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EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

KBW VORK • BOSTON - CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



EDUCATION FOE 
DEMOCRACY 



BY 

HENRY FREDERICK COPE 






J13eto gorb 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
19^0 

All rights reserved 






Copyright, 1920, 
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 



Set up and printed. Published, April, 1920 



MAV (2/920 



©CU566933 



y 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I Education in a Democracy 1 

II Discovering the Need 15 

III Democracy as a Religious Ideal .... 28 

IV Religion in Democratic Education . . . 42 — 
V Education and the Problems of Democracy 59 

VI Problems of World Living 69 

VII The Spiritual Nature of Education in a De- 
mocracy 81, 

VIII The School of Democracy 93 

IX Beginning at Home 108 

X Democratic Training Through the Church 123 \/^ 

XI The Public Schools and Democracy's Pro- 
gram 138 ^ 

XII The Schools and Moral Training . . . 155 __^ 

• XIII Spiritual Values in School Studies . . . 168 

XIV Spiritual Values in School Activities . .183 

XV The Bible and Public Education .... 194 

XVI Organizing the Community 210 

XVII A Community Program 221 

XVIII The Function of a College in a Democracy . 232 

XIX Teaching Religion in the College . . . 245 

XX The Realization of Democracy .... 257 

XXI Democracy in the Crucial Hour .... 266 



EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 



EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

CHAPTER I 

EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

Democracy is more than a form of government; it is 
a social ideal, a mode of life and a quality of the human 
spirit ; therefore it cannot be imposed on a people ; it 
must be acquired. 

Democracy is social self-determination directed toward 
ideal ends. It is the civil organization of a common 
goodwill. It is an attitude of mind which holds that the 
highest good lies in the good of all, that the aim of all 
being is common well-being. It is a faith which holds 
that a common goodwill may control all society. It 
is an ideal which rises in the minds of a free people and 
depends on their w^ills and their wisdom for its expression 
in social life. Hence it has a fundamental interest in 
education as the means by which people gain vision, 
develop a social will and organize their purposes 
effectively. 

But democracy is more than an ideal ; it is a condition 

of living; it is a social order. It is for practice as 

well as for proclamation. We believe in it as a mode 

of social life. It is this practical realization which the 

world most eagerly desires. No question grips us more 

than this : How can our splendid vision be brought 

to earth and men become willing and able to solve their 

problems of living together? Two answers appear in 

American current life: by legislation — that is social 

1 



% EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

regulation and construction, and by education. Which 
is the better way? 

In North America formal education is the product of 
democracy; in the world-life democracy will be largely 
the product of education. The American ideal of democ- 
racy has developed through the practical experience of 
a free people finding working modes of social organization 
and control. That experience not only clarified the ideal 
of democracy, it revealed the conditions of its realization, 
and convinced even the average citizen of its entire 
dependence on education. The government that sets 
men free must aid them to self-government. Political 
self-preservation dictated universal educational oppor- 
tunity. Schools were founded to save the free state, 
and, of necessity, they became free schools. Education 
became a recognized and essential function of a democ- 
racy. The democratic state saves itself by saving its 
selves. Its development depends on the development of 
every member to the very last one. 

Democracy gives birth to general education. If edu- 
cation is the duty of democracy it is because the develop- 
ment of democracy is a certain result of true educa- 
tion. The state must maintain the school because the 
school maintains the state. But the work of the schools 
depends on the spirit of the state. Given a state de- 
signed for democratic ends it will foster a system of 
education designed to develop persons in their social 
capacities. Here schools exist to train the young in 
the art of social living. It is their function so to develop 
in growing persons their social powers and values that 
they will organize an ideal society. The democratic 
purpose expresses itself in education in two ways : First, 
it establishes a definite aim and test, seeking fully devel- 
oped, socially capable citizens ; in a word, education in 
a democracy is simply society organizing itself to develop 
the democratic mind and democratic methods of living. 



EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 3 

Second, it determines the conditions of success in popular 
education: the purposes of education can only be fully 
achieved under democratic conditions ; that is to say, 
persons can develop to their fullness only in a society 
organized primarily for the sake of persons. This is 
the distinguishing mark of a democracy ; it is that form 
of social organization which is determined by the needs 
of persons, in which civil rights are based upon personal 
qualities and rights and in which the needs of persons 
ultimately determine all procedures and shape all aims. 
These characteristics of civil life are essential also to 
an educational program, so that, in an important sense, 
democracy in action is all educative. 

DEMOCRACY DEFINED 

The unity of education and democracy becomes clear 
when, in the light of the modern personal-social aim and 
process of the schools, we come to examine our current 
concept of democracy. That concept is implied in 
Lincoln's famous words, " Government of the people, 
by the people and for the people," with emphasis on the 
last clause. A democracy is that form of social organiza- 
tion for civil purposes which existing by the will of the 
people directs all its powers to promoting the welfare 
of all the people. Other civil forms may exist to main- 
tain the prestige of hereditary monarchs, to perpetuate 
constitutional modes, to extend territory or to advance 
trade; but a democracy has the peculiar purpose, that 
its people may have life and may have it more abundantly. 
It is well to keep in mind this distinguishing mark. It 
is often supposed that the right of every person to 
participate in public affairs makes a democracy ; but that 
right is only incidental to this dominating purpose, that 
every power of the whole social organization shall be 
directed to the public good. That end makes public and 
universal participation essential. The child goes to school 



4 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRAC^ 

for public ends and not for private motives alone; 
schooling is the method by which he lives and learns to 
live the life of a democracy. 

Democracy an educational problem. If the democratic 
state must foster education it is not less true that educa- 
tion must foster the democratic state and society. An 
educational program of developing lives must be seriously 
concerned with the society in which these lives are to 
develop. The new social ideals of education are possible 
only in a social order which is essentially democratic. 
The social aim of the school can be realized only where 
society exists fundamentally for the sake of persons. 
The difficulties in our present system of education are 
largely those due to conditions of operation or control 
which are not truly democratic or to an environment 
which undoes that which the school accomplishes. We are 
seeking to educate persons for freedom under school-room 
experiences of autocracy; the controlling purpose of the 
school often is either the preparation of the children 
of the well-to-do for the dominance of others, or the 
training of others for efficient serfdom. The atmosphere 
of the school may be emphatically anti-democratic; it 
may be the tool of political parties or of a social cabal. 
We can hope to train for democracy only by the 
experience of democracy. At present the school is set 
in a society which does not yet fully believe in social 
education; it is not yet deeply concerned about persons, 
as such, or their powers or their social realizations. 
Rather it is anxious that each shall be prepared to play 
his part to his own individual advantage. And this is 
only to say that our society has not yet accepted democ- 
racy. All that it means and how its meaning is realized 
we are slowly learning. 

Education a political problem. Democracy depends 
on education because it cannot exist by edict ; it is made 
possible only by making democrats. It is more than a 



EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 5 

constitutional civil order; it is a governing ideal in the 
minds of those who constitute the state. It is not a 
method of governing the people ; it is a method by which 
people organize their common affairs. Acts of legislative 
bodies do not make a democracy ; it often exists in spite 
of foiTns of government, as in the case of Great Britain. 
A democracy is possible only as democracy is developed 
in the minds and wills, in the habits and ideals of all the 
people. This is the task of education. 

As a democracy develops the educational imperative 
is intensified. Social life develops intensively and 
extensively. In each civil unit democracy becomes more 
complete ; it reaches out further into all forms of life. 
It widens the social duties and privileges of every person. 
It takes over wider reaches of life. The socialization of 
governmental functions which has developed so rapidly 
in the last decade is, wherever these functions are exer- 
cised by the people for the people, simply the more com- 
plete application of the democratic principle. Even a 
cursory comparison of the duties of citizenship in the 
United States a century ago with those duties to-day 
will suggest the greatly heightened need for the education 
of the citizen. This need is based on the fact that he 
has become more truly and more fully a part of the 
state. He projects more of himself into the life of the 
state ; he not only pays taxes and votes for representa- 
tives ; he must use his brain in thinking through grave 
problems ; and, under the experience of the great war, 
he has learned that he must serve with all his powers as 
part of his identification with the state. 

Democracy makes new demands on all. The develop- 
ment of democracy extensively may make even greater 
demands on the citizen. We look back over the growing 
art of democracy from the folk-meeting and the town- 
meeting to the state and nation, and now we believe we 
are within hailing distance of a world democracy. This 



6 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

is not only an extension from one unit to many, from a 
few states to all states, it is an extension from small 
groups to an all-inclusive group. It is not only a political 
contagion, passing on to new groups ; it is a new life 
which welds all the groups into one. Whatever the actual 
social organization of the world may be to-morrow we 
are facing the problem of living in a world of the closest 
social unity under democratic ideals. Our immediate taslc 
is that of learning to live in the common, close neighbor- 
hood of the whole world. 

A world democracy is upon us almost irrespective of 
forms of civil government, at least the form of civil 
organization follows rather than precedes the democratic 
experience. The whole world has been drawn into a 
common neighboring by the bonds of transportation and 
commerce. To-day we are nearer to the remotest people 
than once we were to those in the next state, and we are 
more dependent on them than once we were on our near 
neighbors. Into every home the life of every land enters 
every day. The breakfast-table may carry contributions 
from every continent. Into the lives of all we each reach 
out, not only with ease but with tremendous potentiality. 
There are no longer any independent peoples. No nation 
can any longer carve out its career alone. The social 
obligations that come from propinquity are on all, 
together with the social duties that arise from mutual 
dependence. The welfare of the least cannot be a matter 
of indifference to the largest. 

PROBLEMS OF WORLD DEMOCRACY 

World living has become a problem m personality. 
This weaving together of the world life has been accom- 
panied by the infusion of the blood of personality into 
the strands of the web. National living has been person- 
alized. It is not governments that are thrown together 
but people. It is not China with whom we have to live 



EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 7 

but the Chinese people. This is the case because the 
contacts are so largely personal. Our relations with 
other people are not matters of diplomatic arrangements ; 
they are matters of our daily bread, our common, personal 
needs and our currency and food of thought and feeling. 
Further, the relations are personal because civil organiza- 
tion increasingly becomes personal. Our world-social 
experiences are determined not by some overhead mech- 
anism created by the state but by our own wills, our own 
habits of life and thought. Our adjustments are not 
between the constitutions of states but between the char- 
acters of peoples. The blood of life is in the web that 
binds us together and so world-relations pass from organ- 
ization to organism. 

Whatever the external forms of civil life may be the 
fact is that all must learn to live together in a common 
world-life which is increasingly democratic in character. 
No one can be exempt from this world-life; none who 
have realized it in any degree desire to be exempt. But 
it is a new life which cannot be lived in the spirit and 
the mode of the old. It makes new demands. It estab- 
lishes new standards. It is constantly revealing new 
requirements. Old ideals are inadequate in a new world. 
Old motives, based on individual or purely national 
concepts, will not be sufficient. We need a new morality 
for a new world life. And therefore we need a new 
education, or, rather, we need the full development of 
our educational ideals, conceived in democracy, to meet 
the needs of this fuller democracy of the race. 

Democracy is essentially a personal process. Before 
attempting to state the characteristics of education for 
democracy, one must face a question that expresses a 
real difficulty to many. Says one, this reasoning moves 
in a circle for it regards democracy as both cause and 
effect in progress, it proposes that the world shall push 
itself up hill. How can democracy both purpose and 



8 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

effect its own progress? Can it grow beyond itself? Is 
it not an attempt to elevate humanity by its own boot- 
straps? Such objections appear to acquire special force 
whenever we contrast the efficiency of a democratic state 
with that of an autocracy. In the latter the overlord, 
looking at his people objectively, can will their betterment 
overnight ; in the former we must wait until the people, 
who must see themselves subjectively, all will their own 
betterment. But such comparisons lose sight of one 
essential feature of a true democracy ; they overlook the 
most important difference between autocracy and democ- 
racy. That difference lies not so much in that there may 
be one governor or many, but in this, that one is a form 
of civil mechanism and the other is a mode of social living. 
Democracy is not a method of making people do things ; 
it is a form of life under which people desire and will to 
do. It is not a method of pushing people up hill ; it is 
the devotion of a people to a purpose which moves them 
forward. It is not a mechanism but an inner motive 
force. It does not expect to lift people but to develop 
them. 

The hope of democracy is not that people will make 
laws regulating themselves into higher living but that 
by the devotion of all to the ends of s'ocial living there 
may be developed a common social will for better living. 
It depends, not on regulation or controls imposed but 
on ideals and motives that furnish an inner propulsion 
for progress. It is government having its seat in the 
wills of people and progress rising in the growing ideals 
and desires of people. 

Is social organization for the ends of personality pos- 
sible? The central problem of democracy then lies in 
the question whether people can develop their own ideals, 
motives, wills, and powers of llife. This development 
must be in the active rather than in the passive mood; 
we must guard against speaking of " developing the 



EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 9 

people," as by some overhead, benevolent and superior 
minority. Improvement has to rise in the common will 
or, if it does not rise there wholly, it must express itself 
in the common will. It is not necessary to discuss the 
question whether people ever do will their own develop- 
ment, for we know that there are not a few who persistently 
seek higher levels and greater strength of life, and we 
know that these individuals stimulate others to like 
endeavors. The question is whether we can have a social 
organism which, as a whole, directs itself toward its own 
development. Can a state be successfully organized for 
the dominant purpose of growing the lives of men and 



women 



? 



Is social evolution wholly subject to blind forces lying 
outside our control, or is man, in the realm of personality, 
a creature capable of self-directed evolution? The purely 
naturalistic answer which subjects us entirely to outer 
forces loses sight of the factor of the human conscious- 
ness and w^ill. This is just as real a fact as any other. 
A person is not only subject to forces; he is a force. 
He is the organizer of forces. He has the power of 
considering, recognizing and, to a large degree, of di- 
recting the very processes that determine what he shall 
be. This is the power that gives rise to education, for 
education is simply our attempt to direct social evolution. 
Education is democracy at work developing its own powers 
of progress. The whole question leaps out of the realm 
of speculation into that of demonstration. In the labora- 
tory of life we are to-day scientifically working out an 
answer to the question. Democracy is proving that 
man can direct his own development. Every school is a 
laboratory in that field. Social life and industry are 
being directed and modified to an increasing degree by 
the recognition of their power to determine character. 
All life is being studied with reference to the educational 
opportunities it offers and the forces it creates. In a 



10 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

democracy we tend steadily toward the determination of 
all the conditions of living by the study of their educa- 
tional effects, by the manner in which they stimulate and 
modify our lives. We ask, what manner of people are 
being made by these things? 

THE HOPE OF A BETTER WORLD 

The realization of a truly democratic society depends 
very much on the development of a spirit of humanism, 
that is, on an acceptance of the happiness and well-being 
of all mankind as the supreme aim in human existence. 
Writing in days when the world is still in arms, when men 
confidently ascribe the success of their side to the force 
that sheds human blood, it is difficult to believe that such 
a spirit can dominate mankind. Yet if it cannot, if the 
good of all cannot be the aim of all, democracy is no 
more than a political dream. A writer ^ in one of the 
most thoughtful journals recently strongly urged the 
" Ground for Hope," as he expressed it ; he finds many 
signs, traceable through the history of civilization, that 
we are coming to a common social aim of human well- 
being. He seeks for evidence in the question whether 
" men have in that period of modem history become more 
united, better able to use their combined forces to a com- 
mon end of social good, and whether on the whole they 
have so used their powers. If this appears to be the 
case, then in a practical sense the ideal of humanity is 
brought nearer, and world relations on the mechanical 
side are favorable to the increase of the common elements 
in ethics and religion." ^ He also pertinently quotes : 
" Ethically, as well as physically, humanity is becoming 
one, one, not by the suppression of differences or the 
mechanical arrangement of lifeless parts, but by a widened 
consciousness of obligation, a more sensitive response to 

1 F. S. Marvin, in the Hibbert Journal for April, 1918, page 387. 

2 Ibid., page 392. 



EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 11 

the claims of justice, a greater forbearance toward differ- 
ences of type, a more enlightened conception of human 
purpose." ^ 

The democratic ideal is being formed in all experience, 
A democratic society must always tend to conceive it- 
self in educational terms. It will see all life — whether 
in the home, in social intercourse, in commerce, in shop 
and factory or school — as an experience in school- 
ing, in the development of powers, in discipline in the 
art of living. So long as men are alive and so long 
as their lives touch one another they must continue to 
be educated. No man goes into a factory or a mill in 
the morning and comes out the same person at night; 
he has been changed by the experience of social contacts 
with other lives, by work and by thought. Now this 
is one of those very simple facts that needs no elaborate 
presentation. But it has been a fact which has not been 
recognized always as a basis for action. Democracy, 
because its main interest is in the changes that take 
place in men and women, in the question whether those 
changes are for the better or for the worse, democracy 
looks at that day in the factory from a new angle, from 
the educational point of view. A democracy says, We 
will determine the conditions of factory-life because these 
conditions determine so largely the lives of those who are 
the state, in fact the factory helps to make or mar the 
democracy. So that the interest in social welfare which 
the modern state exhibits is something more than an 
extension of its functions, it is the expression of its 
very purpose, it is the discharge of its function of devel- 
oping the lives of its people. It is government not only 
of the people, as to conditions of living, but for the 
people, that these conditions may make the best kind of 
people. No democracy can ignore any conditions that 
affect the characters of persons. 

1 Quotation from L. H. Hobhouse, "Morals in Evolution" (1916). 



12 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

The manifold concerns of the democracy with the 
details of the life of the people are exhibitions of educa- 
tional activity. They reveal a social will organizing and 
directing the forces of life, determining the experiences of 
persons and groups, choosing the stimuli that shall come 
to their lives, presenting to them forms of activity, so 
that out of the whole of life there may develop a strong, 
wise, just and loving people, living together in common 
goodwill. 

If education is democracy addressing itself to the duty 
of self-development, hom can we he sure that we are 
moving m the right direction? How can we prepare 
for the future when it is unknown to us? But it is not 
necessary to predict the future nor to know the precise 
conditions under which our children will have to live. We 
have ground more sure than guesses about to-morrow. 
We have, first, before our eyes readily discernable social 
movements, the direction of which may be clearly seen 
even though the end is not in sight, and, second, we 
have this principle to proceed upon : that the best prepara- 
tion for higher functions is the full discharge of existing 
and present ones. To meet fully the demands of the 
present hour is the best preparation for the coming one. 
We do know what our needs are to-day and we know what 
is called for by the present developments in our social 
order. If this is an orderly universe we can safely pro- 
ceed on the assurance that the duty of the present fully 
met prepares for the demands of to-morrow. 

What then are the outstanding needs of democracy 
at this hour? If the concept of democracy here stated 
is the true one then it is evident that the old answers to 
this question are totally inadequate. These answers have 
advocated a number of valuable additions to our educa- 
tional program, some of which have proved highly useful. 
They are efficient but not sufficient. We have been urged 
to extend " education in citizenship," by which is meant. 



EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 13 

usually, instruction in the mode of our form of govern- 
ment, in its local and state applications and in its constitu- 
tional basis and present ideals. This needs to be done; 
it is a constantly imperative duty in a nation absorbing 
thousands of citizens from lands alien in government and 
ideals. We must have a citizenship intelligent as to 
methods of procedure. And yet it takes more than civics 
to make a citizen anywhere, and in a democracy more 
than anywhere else. 

We are told that one of the educational needs of a 
democracy is that the people shall be trained for practical 
usefulness. No one questions the value of vocational 
training provided it means a vocation and a training for 
all, that it does not mean the regimentation of the masses 
to be the earlier ready for drafting into the ranks of 
industry and that it does not mean depriving the young 
of their heritage of joy and culture in order that they 
may acquire the habits of wage-earning. But there is 
no assurance that industrial efficiency will be accompanied 
by competency to live the social life of a democracy. 
Learning to make a living is part of the art of life ; but 
it is only part. A nation of expert mechanics, merchants 
and farmers would doubtless be better than a nation of 
untrained and shiftless people ; competency in industry 
and commerce are amongst the foundations of national 
happiness and power ; but those competencies may develop 
a people into the very opposite of a democracy, into a 
mere aggregation of groups each devoting its efficiencies 
to its own ends, each seeking its own advantages and 
thus developing, through unrestrained competition, only 
social anarchy. 

So slight a dismissal of these important needs in educa- 
tion does not indicate an opinion that they are valueless. 
They are essential. They are parts of the program of 
education for democracy. But they have been so empha- 
sized as to obscure certain other and yet more important 



14 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

parts without which they are valueless. If democracy is 
social organization for the sake of the growth of peo- 
ple, for the development of their lives in a society, then 
the educational program must include more than learning 
the mechanics of government and more than training in 
habits of self-support. It must include all that is involved 
in the art of life in a society. The duty of a democracy 
is to train its people to live in a society devoted to the 
good of all. 

Education for to-morrow's democracy will be education 
for the fullness of living in society as effective, contribut- 
ing members, serving its ends, devoted to its ideals, habit- 
uated to its ways and trained to realize its purposes. 
Education for to-morrow's democracy means facing this J 
problem: have we the vision, can we find the means and 
develop the agencies not only to teach all how a society of 
common goodwill should be organized, but also, through 
actual experience, to train ourselves and our children in its 
habits and activities, to grow in vision of its ideals and to 
develop motives sufficiently high and strong to sustain and 
inspire in all that may be involved in its realization.'* 



CHAPTER II 

DISCOVERING THE NEED 

Are our present educational plans and ideals adequate 
for democracy as it must be? 

Education for democracy would be a simple matter 
under some conditions. It would be proper to assume 
that any system of education in a truly democratic society, 
when taken along with the experience of living in that 
society, would constitute adequate preparation for democ- 
racy. Many complacently assume that this is the happy 
condition prevailing in America. Popular orators have 
stimulated our pride in democratic institutions until we 
often dream that a democratic society was created by 
the Continental Congress and consummated by the fifteenth 
amendment to the Constitution. Then they point to our 
schools which, since they are ours, must be the best on 
earth ; surely here children receive all training necessary 
for democracy for they have courses in American history 
and civics ; they learn all about the theoretical machinery 
of our political life! What more could democracy need? 
Why should we assume that there is need for some new 
or special type of education in order to prepare for the 
future democracy? 

If we have democracy to-day two results follow. First, 
the very experience of living in a democracy constitutes 
the best preparation for that form of social life; and, 
Second, any true democracy will be so conscious of its 
requirements as to make full and adequate provision for 
the training of the young. Both these propositions would 
be true if we were now living in a democracy. But we 
are not. We have at present only certain elements of 

15 



16 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

democracy, principally in our forms of political life. We 
have some democratic institutions, but we do not have a 
democratic order of society. Rauschenbusch well says, 
" Political democracy without economic democracy is an 
uncashed promissory note, a pot without a roast, a form 
without substance." ^ We cannot have such an order so 
long as society permits avoidable injustices, so long as 
it exploits the weak, builds fortunes for the few out of 
the extremities and adversities of the many, permits one 
to reap where he has not sown, to enjoy riches that 
others have earned and are not permitted to enjoy, gives 
larger rights to the rich than to the poor and continues 
to regard the child as largely a negligible social factor. 
Life in the present social order is not an habituation to 
democracy, but it is calculated to quicken hunger for it. 

We have yet to acquire democracy. We must teach 
the practice of democracy because it is an unrealized 
ideal. It cannot be learned in the way that a child 
learns his forms of play because at present it is not 
atmospheric and habitual. We must not confound our 
current emphasis on the phrases of democracy with its 
actual realization. We are told many times every day 
that the great war was fought for democracy. And, in 
a most important sense, this is exactly true ; it is the 
price we still are paying to assert the dominance of human 
rights over all other considerations. But we must not 
delude ourselves into thinking that because we have 
inscribed democracy on our banners, and because we are 
paying a tremendous price for a common international 
recognition of one of its simple tenets, that, by these 
tokens, we have fulfilled democracy. Nor must we hope 
that reiteration of these ideals will give our children the 
training they need for the democracy of to-morrow. It 
is easy to mistake the currency of phrases for the reality 
they represent. 

1 " Christianizing the Social Order," page 353. 



DISCOVERING THE NEED 17 

Democracy waits for the democratic mind and will. 
We may through the war come to the realization of 
a world civil order; but democracy's struggle will not 
be over even when all political units shall bear its name 
and use its forms. Democracy will not be achieved so 
long as men are willing to use any form of social leverage 
— business, education, politics, religion, or the exigencies 
of war-times — to secure advantages for themselves at 
the price of loss or deprivation to others. Democracy 
will not be achieved so long as we consent to the contin- 
uance of social relations predicated on human selfishness, 
guided by competitive motives and resulting in social 
inequalities not determined by justice or merit. Democ- 
racy will not be achieved until our minds have been 
changed, until we have repented of the old ways that 
brought us to industrial and economic chaos, until we 
desire the good of all far more ardently than we now 
covet all the goods we can get. Changes such as these 
are much more than changes in government and politics ; 
they are changes in human ideals and motives, changes 
possible only through the careful, intelligent, long- 
continued education of our minds and wills. Democracy 
waits for a generation controlled by a social view of all 
life and by a common social goodwill. 

THE DEMANDS OF NEW WORLD LIFE 

But we have one further and highly important consid- 
eration ; that we must have special training for democracy 
because the democracy of the future will be of a special 
kind. If the society of to-morrow was to be simply the 
normal development, by easy and natural stages, of the 
society of to-day we might assert that to-day's experience 
was the only necessary schooling for to-morrow. But the 
world has broken with its past, having tested and rejected 
many of its ways ; social things are being made new. We 
enter a new world order. It will be different because old 



18 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

methods have failed, old reliances have broken down, old 
settled habits have been uprooted; old ways have proven 
inadequate; new social alignments have appeared; new 
experiences have been given to almost all young people; 
new powers have been developed in peoples ; new social 
dependencies have appeared; new forms of cooperation 
have been tried. Still more, in the future, new demands 
will be made on all; it will not be enough to be a good 
man, one will have to be a man whose life counts with all 
other lives for the world's good. It will not be enough 
that one is honest in business, according to the world's 
customs ; one will have to be honest according to the 
world's needs. Men must square their business, not with 
the ethics of the trade but with the good of humanity. 
Not only will men demand their rights in the worth of 
living; we shall accept our responsibilities to secure to 
each his full rights. Soon we shall see that so closely are 
we all bound in the bundle of life that no man can be 
poor to himself, none can be abject, hopeless, oppressed 
to himself, that we each have an unavoidable share in 
the life of the saddest and in the suffering of all. We 
shall learn that no nation can afford to have any of its 
people below par, none can afford to weaken heart and 
life by unnecessary suffering, for the people are the nation 
and the nation is the people. We are staggered before 
the problem of the new world with all its changes, its 
social reorganization, its new ways of thinking; and shall 
we expect that our children will be ready for its life 
unless we take some special measures to prepare them? 
Democracy has been in a bitter school of experience. 
Democracy came to one of its great tests in the world 
war. This terrible struggle demanded the utmost of every 
people. It called for the devotion of all their resources, 
the application of all their energies, the development of 
all their efficiencies ; it demanded sacrifice and cheerful- 
ness in bearing losses, suffering reverses, enduring hard- 



DISCOVERING THE NEED 19 

ships and facing death. All this, and more, it asked in 
the name of the good of humanity, for the sake of the 
ultimate ideals of democracy. 

The testing of American democracy came as soon as 
the struggle passed from the area of national relationships 
to that of human interests, when it passed from a quarrel 
between Germany and her neighbors to the defiance by 
Germany of the rights of peoples, the laws of humanity 
and the established morals of civilization. Then we who 
had preached and boasted so long about the universal 
brotherhood of man stood by and watched our brothers 
being cruelly slaughtered, watched one people, armed by 
decades of stem application and preparation, coolly loot 
our neighbors, ravage their lands, destroy their treasures, 
slay their children and ravish their women. We were slow 
to see the significance of the struggle, dull to the motives 
that outweighed all other considerations, such as mixed 
aims in the allied nations ; the one clear issue was clouded 
by their treaties and our traditions, as well as by our 
commercial policies, and that one issue was that of human 
rights over against autocratic, organized and brutally 
strong selfishness. It was an issue of democracy ; when 
at last we met it — so late that many of us will long hang 
our heads with shame at the delay — then we had a 
wonderful experience in democratic national life. Two 
features clearly appeared: First, democracy justified 
itself as responsive to ideals. A great tide of devotion 
to ideal service swept over us. ^len and women gave 
themselves without reservation to whatever service most 
was needed; families gave sons and fathers with tearful 
joy, their hearts fixed on high purposes. Second, a com- 
manding purpose brought us into new cooperation. We 
found unity in a common loyalty to a sufficiently high 
enterprise. In every community the old divisions were 
wiped out as all toiled, in actual labor, for the common 
cause of world freedom. We tasted the joys of a common 



20 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

life under a democratic purpose to make this a world con- 
trolled by human rights and interests. 

The events are too near to permit of proper perspective. 
The experience was not all ideally perfect. The despoiler 
was present. There always will be spiritual aliens in a 
democracy ; often they are the ones who prate most of 
citizenship. But food-exploiters, tax-dodgers, slackers, 
and profiteering princes only stood out in greater contrast 
to popular devotion and service. They were but evidences 
of the dangers incident to democracy, as crime is incident 
to the law. They indicated that we had failed to furnish 
society the power to relieve itself of the real enemies of 
democracy. But there were, even in the joy of our dis- 
covery of common ideals and common service, frequent 
stirrings of conscience to ask, why had we waited for 
this strain to reveal the possibilities of democracy.? Why 
had we failed, in the normal days of prosperity and world 
calm, to develop the commanding ideals, train in the 
loyalties and furnish the controls of conduct which would 
guide all persons? Here we seemed to fail as a whole; 
it raised the question whether democracy had educated for 
permanent moral and spiritual living. 

We had developed the danger of perverted patriotism. 
We had cultivated a patriotism of national pride instead 
of one of national devotion to purposes greater than the 
nation. We had been proud of democracy because it 
afforded freedom of personal action, a chance for greater 
rewards in personal possessions than was possible in other 
nations. We contrasted ourselves with autocracy not at 
the point of efTectiveness in government for the sake of 
people, not as to the permanent treasures of national 
greatness in idealism, but at the point of individual riches. 
We had hidden our ideals and exhibited our efficiencies in 
making and keeping things. In a word, to a large degree, 
we had lost sight of the real ends of democracy. We had 
turned this social agency for developing people into a 



DISCOVERING THE NEED 21 

machinery for making goods, for selling goods and making 
fortunes. 

MISDIRECTED EFFICIENCIES 

Temporarily democracy had misdirected its efficiencies. 
It thought of people in terms of business instead of busi- 
ness in terms of people. It had listened to voices from 
Prussia, voices which had been vested with authority in 
our universities and confided with responsibilities in civic 
life, voices which practically said, " Man lives by bread 
alone, therefore organize all your society into grades of 
bread-winners and bend all your energies to securing their 
bread-winning efficiency." We had imported large 
elements of our educational system from Germany ; these 
elements were rapidly and deliberately crowding out all 
that was not of their world of things. They declared that 
alone scientific which could be measured spatially. Their 
teachers were blinded to all that could not be seen. They 
were fast making us think of civic life as a vast, intricate, 
soulless machine, wonderfully efficient, smooth-running and 
serving wholly material ends of power and wealth. We 
became ashamed of our earlier idealism; it belonged to a 
pioneer stage, to an earlier day when men were willing to 
be misled by dreams. We had found more efficient ways ; 
we could handle this human material as we would handle 
any other material. Who does not remember the period 
of the " efficiency engineer " who not only had his place 
in the factory but was called to the school and to civic 
life to regulate its affairs ? Their systems were efficient ; 
but they were deficient; they failed to take into account 
all the factors. They were practical-minded ; having lost 
nine-tenths of their minds — the powers of idealism, of 
recognizing spiritual values — they capitalized what was 
left. 

A democracy is always in danger of losing its soul. 
It develops a system and forgets the spirit and aim for 



22 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

which the system exists. Democracy is not a system with 
a soul ; it is a soul which works out its system. Democracy 
is in the whole what man should be in the singular. Men 
build barns and business because of their needs as men, 
but in time the barns and business becoming so engrossing 
that they think of building men because barns and business 
need them. In any intricate system tools always have a 
tendency to relegate the product to a secondary place. 
Left to themselves through the calm summer days, when 
the crops mature so plentifully, it seems as though life's 
aim was filling barns. Then later speaks the voice at 
midnight, " Thou fool ! This night thy soul is required 
of thee." 

We looked out on nations that heard that voice. They 
answered flinging all their treasure into the struggle that 
the soul might be saved. All that they had so painfully 
gathered together they counted for naught that human 
rights might be saved, that men might be free. We saw 
them recklessly spending for an idea the very treasures we 
had been so successful in gathering, and we were not yet 
ready to forsake our bursting barns in order to save our 
souls. We at first refuse to see that we must either turn 
aside from business as usual or lose ourselves altogether. 

Democracy has tested the educational method. Now 
when the time came that we were compelled to stand either 
with free men or be slaves, when we must choose either 
to serve ideal ends or to be sold into bondage, what steps 
were taken to secure unity of ideal action in the democ- 
racy.'^ None who lived through the first years of 
America's participation in the war will ever forget the 
tremendous efforts, on a national scale, to stimulate and 
direct the thought and feeling and action of the people. 
In a word, we depended on an educational program. It 
was a program of teaching through publicity in news- 
papers, magazines, the pulpit, schools, bill-boards, the 
theatres, the platform and the mail. We found out that 



DISCOVERING THE NEED 23 

it was necessary to form the minds of people, that we 
could make no progress save as the wills of men and 
women were moved. " Wake up, America 1 " we shouted, 
and America slept on. Then we began to teach America, 
and she was awakened. A thorough campaign of educa- 
tion not only secured national unity of action but, what 
was vastly more important, it secured unity of feeling and 
sentiment on a high level for the nation's ideals. 

Standing in the midst of the great events it is evident 
that the method which has succeeded in meeting an imme- 
diate urgency is the method we have neglected all too long. 
We have not educated the nation for democracy. Our 
system and plans of education have not been determined 
by the needs of the present, still less by the demands of 
the future, but by the traditions of the past. We have 
inherited our educational practice from aristocracy, and 
we have imported parts of it from autocracy. It has not 
been designed for democracy. The schools did not regard 
the child as a potential socially responsible self-governing 
factor in the life of the state. ^ They trained in aptitudes 
which had no special reference to those forms of social 
cooperation and service which are essential in a democratic 
society. They taught civics which differed from mon- 
archy or autocracy only in form and not in purpose or 
spirit, failing to reveal the soul of democracy. Above 
all they failed to develop the ideals and motives which, in 
the individual, make a democracy possible. 

Moreover, we have been under the necessity of effecting 
certain fundamental changes in the habitual thinking of 
large elements in our population, of changing their ideals 
and concepts. Intellectually we are in a singular position 
in regard to democracy. It is conceived as a form of 
government, but all our inherited ideas as to governments 
place them in the category of imposed institutions. The 

1 See George A. Coe on " The Functions of ChUdren in a Com- 
munity," in Religious Education for February, 1918. 



g4 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

words, " state " and " government," hold meanings almost 
wholly either monarchial or feudal. They create a picture 
of some overhead authority. The delusion that a few 
were born to rule and the many to serve has been ground 
deep into the fiber of civilized thought. Monarchy in 
some form or another dies a lingering death. The very 
phrase " divine right of kings " is so old that it still 
carries the authority of usage to many. Therefore, when 
we speak of a democratic government we tend to think of 
something outside ourselves, a power which, while created 
by ourselves, has its seat and authority elsewhere. It is 
difficult to keep clearly in mind the fact that " we, the 
people " are the state, the government and the democracy. 

This intellectual concept of an external authority ruling 
over us is deeply rooted in those who were born under 
monarchies and autocracies. They know that they are 
now in a democratic state, but they think of themselves 
as being under a democracy, just as formerly they were 
under a monarchy, instead of realizing that they are not 
under but in, not yielding service to but yielding them- 
selves to that of which they are a part. The radical 
educational problem with such minds is to get them to 
see the real meaning of democracy, to help them realize 
their identity with it. Democracy must be transferred 
from the old grouping of governments — where it is a 
better and freer kind of lordship — into a new class, that 
of social self-determination. 

These facts accounted for no small degree of our 
lethargy and apparent indifference. They called and 
they still call for a process of interpreting democracy 
within our own borders. They complicated the problem 
of national conversion. We faced a world-testing of 
democracy with a citizenship one-half of which rejoiced 
in freedom principally because of the personal advantages 
it conferred and a large portion of which knew not at 
all what democracy really means. 



DISCOVERING THE NEED 25 

Education must recognize that democracy makes certain 
peculiar demands on human nature. Since the educational 
system is responsible for training the members of a democ- 
racy it is responsible for preparing them to meet those . 
demands. Since all human relationships constitute moral 
situations democracy is a moral situation determined by 
motives of social interests as supreme. Education for 
democracy is not only education for social living, it is 
education for living under conditions in which the interests 
of society, of the well-being and happiness of the whole 
must always take precedence of our own personal interests 
and desires. This is true if democracy is self-government 
for the people. Education for democracy, then, is educa- 
tion for social living under social motives. 

ESSENTIALS IN EDUCATION 

No scheme or system of education can be adequate so 
long as it fails to recognize these two related facts, that 
it must train the young to live in societ}^, and that it 
must train them in the motive and ideal of self-devotion 
to the good of society. There are involved here the two 
related and inseparable ideas of social education and 
religious education. Education for democracy will be^ 
social education in that it trains lives to live with others ; 
it will be religious education in that it trains lives to 
live for others. Neither is possible without the othery/ 
We cannot live with people except as we really love them ; 
we cannot love them until we do live with them. 

It may be said that all these considerations lie in the 
realm of sentiments and ideals. The assumption under- 
lying the objection is that sentiments and ideals are unreal 
and negligible matters and that education has to do only 
with the practical concerns of life. It is a part of that 
leaden-eyed philosophy which sees only the ground at a 
man's toes. Such objectors are apt to say that we must 
face the stern realities of life and leave theory and ideals 



26 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

to take care of themselves. But ideals are not theories ; 
they are the underlying facts which determine all things 
in this world; they make cities, build bridges, lead armies 
and really do all the big things. Your practical man 
never gets beyond the plans the idealist has sketched. 
And sentiments are not vapory nothings ; they are the 
stern realities of life; they are its motive power and its 
compass. They make all social motion and determine its 
direction. Our constant danger is that we shall neglect 
these realities, that we shall build engines complete in all 
details except that they will not work because they lack 
motive power. We think we are practical because we 
build the apparatus of life and neglect altogether its 
springs of action. 

The need of education for democracy, then, is that we 
shall fully recognize the essential importance of developing 
right sentiments and ideals, that we shall not neglect what 
Bismarck called " the imponderables." The testing time 
has revealed our deep need of a spiritual consciousness in 
civil and political life. The war has been won ; whether 
the winning will be worth while depends on the kind of 
men and women we are and the kind our children shall 
be. The preparation we most of all have needed and do 
still need is the preparation of our minds with high ideals, 
the training of our spirits to such an appreciation of 
the worth of human interests as shall move us to pay 
any price for their preservation. We need to realize that, 
like democracy itself, education for democracy deals with 
persons, and that persons are not educated until they 
develop their powers as persons, until controls of conduct 
are developed, until they have the powers of self-knowledge 
and self-control, until they have the vision of life that 
guides them into its social fullness. Because these needs 
have been so largely neglected it would seem that the 
emphasis in our educational endeavors at this time should 
be in the direction of training in life for ideal ends, in 



DISCOVERING THE NEED 87 

the education of persons as social beings living for social 
ends, or, in a word, on religious education in its broad 
aspects. 

This then is the need of democracy : A motive or spirit 
of life which makes it possible and desirable for us to live 
with others and to live for others. Democracy depends 
on the social will that substitutes cooperation for com- 
petitive struggle. Democracy requires devotion to the 
good of all as the supreme and dominating purpose in all 
lives. Under no other motives is it possible to live in 
the congested, interwoven world life. It is not a question 
of which is best; this only is possible. Any other way 
lies the unending conflict of selfish passions pushing the 
warring groups on to social suicide. The world is par- 
alyzed so long as it is ruled by passions for greed, " red 
in tooth and claw," for this world is other than the world 
of beasts. Man needs sympathy, the things not gained 
by strength alone, for he lives not by bread alone. For 
the very continuance of human existence, and certainly 
for its progress, no other way is possible than that of 
social unity secured by common devotion to ideal pur- 
poses. Only the religious will survive in the new world 
order. Then the central need in education for democracy 
is that of education in the life that is religious, is that 
of training in the spirit of devotion to a society of good 
will, is that of religious education. 



CHAPTER III 

DEMOCRACY AS A RELIGIOUS IDEAL 

As the ideals of democracy are clarified they are ele- 
vated. Government for the people is lifted above the 
aims of government for national advantages, for the 
extension of trade or for the increase of reserves of wealth. 
Some old motives lose their power and others, yet older, 
return with deeper meaning; America says less about the 
opportunity of every man to gain riches and thinks more 
of the obligations of freedom. 

Democracy, seeking the good of all, discovers that no 

good is abiding until all enjoy the highest good, and that 

no people can be rich in things in any satisfying or 

enduring manner until they are rich in themselves. 

Democracy realizes that nations are never greater than 

their people, and that social welfare is at root a matter 

of social will. Every attempt to secure public good by 

popular means leads to the same conclusion : that the 

happiness, freedom and well-being of a people comes not 

by regulation, nor by legislation, but all wait on the wills 

of men and cannot come save from within the hearts and 

minds of men. This is not a speculative philosophy of 

idealism preached by a few doctrinaires ; it is the bald 

fact which confronts every student of social institutions, 

that human progress waits for the human will, that there 

is no such thing as the prosperity of a people until they 

are rich and strong in themselves. A democracy is a 

social organization, in a civic form, which accepts this 

law and counts principally on the quality of its people 

for the power of its state. 

The central interest of democracy, then, lies in peo- 

28 



DEMOCRACY AS A RELIGIOUS IDEAL 29 

'ple as persons. Its aim is not only government by the 
will of the people but government by the goodwill of 
all, by the power of the people constantly ^villing the 
highest good for all. Its central problem is that of devel- 
oping this will, of securing desire, intent and purpose 
toward the social ideals of the state. Its task, therefore, 
is one of education, of training persons in the power of 
self-direction toward broad social ideals, of developing 
social wisdom and power of choosing steadily the highest 
good in life. Unless this power is developed our freedom 
will mean but a wild scramble for passing gains, a common 
and bloody warfare in which each madly strives for his 
own goods. Some have so interpreted democracy, as the 
chance of every man to enter with all his powers into 
the common, competitive combat for the possession of 
things. Sometimes we have gloried in the supposed right 
of social civil war, of internal rapine. We have talked 
of the glorious chance open to every one of becoming rich 
at the expense of his fellows, of the chance of the poor 
boy to climb from the slums to the crest of affluence as 
though elevation enlarged a man. We seem to have 
imagined that a mouse on the peak of a mountain must 
be a mammoth. But the delusion is less common than 
the superficial evidences indicate. We make much over 
the feat of the mouse; but we know that our democracy 
exists for something far greater than the purpose of 
populating the peaks of prosperity with freaks, men of 
swollen substance and shrunken souls. And we are learn- 
ing, too, that the glory of a nation lies not in its records 
of sudden fortunes but in its steady development of the 
common good. 

In the hearts of men are the facts of life. Every 
page of the past and every problem of the present pro- 
claims the same fact, that neither with a man nor a 
nation does life consist in the abundance of things 
possessed, that happiness lies not in having but in the 



30 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

power of appreciating and enjoying, that riches are not 
possessed by the hands but by the heart, and that no 
nation can be great unless the people themselves are 
great. The glory of a nation depends not on extent of 
territory, nor on resources or possessions, nor on army 
or navy or factories or trade, but on the minds and 
affections and ideals of its people. Belgium devastated 
is greater than Belgium humming with industry. France 
" bled white " under the pressure of barbarism recru- 
descent is greater than France in her prosperity. Scot- 
land's granite hills, with all their beauty, offer little to 
the seeker after riches, but Scotland's name will always 
be associated with true greatness. All stand out known 
by their souls. 

A soulless democracy is u/nthinkahle. When a gov- 
ernment is deliberately organized with the purpose of 
protecting, strengthening and enriching the life of its 
people, its first and always dominating concern must be 
with the inner concerns of their lives, with their well- 
being in all that makes a people great. The problem 
of democracy is a spiritual problem. Democracy seeks 
the salvation of the souls of men in the widest, highest, 
fullest sense, for democracy ultimately seeks the salvation 
of society. It looks toward a salvation greater than 
any designed to protect individuals from the arbitrary 
dictates of an offended deity, a salvation which brings 
each one out into the freedom and fullness of all his life, 
and into the joy and power of the life of all. It is a 
salvation directed toward character and condition rather 
than toward any theoretical status. Democracy believes 
that life may be whole, healthful, rounded-out and rich, 
that its inner springs may be clear and strong, that men 
may come to will the true rather than the false, light 
rather than darkness and love rather than hate. It 
knows that truth and light and love will not bless the 
lives of all until they command the desires and wills of 



DEMOCRACY AS A RELIGIOUS IDEAL 31 

all. Therefore a democracy must be concerned with 
deeper things than political forms and commercial suc- 
cesses, for its permanence depends on the extent to which 
its ideals rule in the hearts of men. How serious and 
far-reaching, then, is the program of education for democ- 
racy ! It is no less than the development of those motives, 
powers and habits which enable all to live a common life 
of helpfulness, of fellowship on life's highest levels, in 
the fullness of all its possibilities, under its finest motives 
and toward its best ideals. This is the fundamental 
educational problem that confronts democracy. Is it too 
much to call it a spiritual problem.'^ Can we not see it 
as a religious task? 

Democracy is a spiritual process. Education for this 
form of social living moves out into a broad region. 
Democrats are not made by passing an examination on 
the Constitution of the United States. The law may 
say that citizenship is acquired by such a process, but 
the law does no more than confer certain civil rights ; it 
cannot endow the citizen with those qualities which make 
citizenship in a democracy. For a democracy is not an 
affair of a social contract, based on rights granted by 
authority ; it is an affair of the spirit. It can exist 
only where men and women have common spiritual ideals, 
where they effectively place the values of persons first 
of all and are willing to pay any price for these. It is 
a matter of the spirit because it exists for the sake of 
our spiritual rights. We speak of freedom as our 
heritage; what do we mean.'' Is it that we have liberty 
of action, to go where we will and, largely, to do what 
we wish.'' That were a small gain. We mean that we 
have freedom to follow the desires of our own hearts, to 
achieve our own ambitions, to dream high things and then 
to do them. It is not physical freedom we cherish, but 
freedom of the spirit. Above all, this is a land of free- 
dom of thought; our freedom of action is simply our 



S2 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

right to follow in action the free path marked out by 
the spirit within. Education for democracy is possible 
only as provision is made for the direction of this spir- 
itual freedom. 

SPIRITUAL VALUES OUT OF SOCllALt EXPiERIE'NCE 

Education for democracy is a spiritual problem because 
it deals with the great questions of social values. It seeks 
to train people to living for the highest social ends. A 
democracy is the political discovery of the highest form 
of values in civil organization. Having rejected the aims 
of personal prestige, commercial or military dominion, 
territory and tribute, the democratic nation says, " We 
find the good that is highest, the value most worth while, 
in the lives of persons and in the life of society." Here 
is a splendid ideal, seen long ago by a few prophetic souls, 
sung by poets and prophets and now adopted, simply and 
definitely, as a national aim. Democracy is a national 
assertion of the rights of the soul, for this well-being that 
is sought for all people is the well-being of the people 
themselves. It is the devotion of a nation to the devel- 
opment of wealth in persons. To a democracy all pros- 
perity of wages, high standards of living conditions, and 
amplitudes of resources are but means to a further end, 
that those who possess these things may be richer in 
themselves, happier, stronger and more noble in spirit. 

Democracy becomes a national faith. It is not diffi- 
cult to see how this high spiritual idealism has grown out 
of Christianity and now fuses with it at every point 
where it is set free to declare its meaning and value for 
life. It is not difficult to see how it is becoming the 
inspiring creed of thoughtful men and women everywhere 
to-day. Its hope is that which makes life's struggle worth 
while. It is the shining goal at the end of all our endeav- 
ors for social justice, for right conditions of living for 
all persons, for sunlight and air and play for children. 



DEMOCRACY AS A RELIGIOUS IDEAL 33 

for leisure and health for men and women, for intelligence 
and knowledge for all, for freedom and personal rights. 
The high price we pay to oppose barbaric autocracy, the 
trains of treasure and rivers of blood that flow forth in 
a great w^orld war, go out with no regret — save that 
for the hideous origin and the barbaric method imposed 
on us — but with hearts made strong through the hope 
that we may have a world-order of true democracy, that 
the rights of the spirit may be set above all other rights 
and become regnant in our world. 

Democracy waits on the educated wills of all. A 
democratic nation and a democratic world cannot come 
alone through the splendid vision of a few. It does begin 
here; but it must move on until all at last have the 
vision. This makes the diff^erence of our modern concept 
from Plato's Republic. His ideal is an elaborate organ- 
ization intellectually conceived by a few and not concerned 
with the mass. For democracy is not only social organ- 
ization for the good of all, but social organization for 
that end as determined by the will of all and secured 
through the w^ork of all. The ideal cannot be fully 
realized until it is seen and desired by all. The people, 
as well as the prophets, must have the vision. The 
inclusive educational task therefore is that of training 
and inspiring a people to a democratic interpretation of 
all life. 

If democratic living is based on the primacy of spir- 
itual values then its first need wall be an intelligent recog- 
nition and appreciation of spiritual values and its first 
duties will be those of training in living for those values ; 
in a word, democracy is confronted by a problem and task 
of religious education. Democracy is essentially a 
religious enterprise because the social ends to which democ- 
racy is devoted are the values in persons and in society, 
the values of the spirit to which religion is addressed. A 
religious person is one whose life is devoted, under the 



34 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

ideal of such values, to realizing a society of the spirit, 
a social order, a " kingdom of God " in which love, 
righteousness, peace and goodness are the ruling powers, 
in which men become more and more like their divine ideal 
and the world more and more like the splendid vision for 
which men so long have prayed. And a religious society 
is that which is devoted to the realization of this ideal 
through its forms of social or civic life and power. Sub- 
stitute " democratic " for the word " religious " and the 
parallel between the two becomes apparent. 

In a democracy the supremacy of the spiritual must 
he a common ideal, A common social goodwill rises only 
in the wills of all. The fundamental problem is that of 
developing a spiritual concept of life in all. If we resolve 
the question of education for democracy into a discussion 
of the problems of religious education it is because this 
includes all the rest. It is because religious education 
simply means that kind of education which trains persons 
to live, as religious persons, in a religious society and to 
realize the ideals of that society and carry them forward 
into the future. 

We cannot solve modern world problems until they are 
treated as religious problems. So long as they are mat- 
ters to be adjusted by diplomacy, by legislation or 
regulation their roots remain untouched. Social solutions 
cannot come by adjustments of any sort, for social prob- 
lems are problems of people and people are not things ; 
they cannot be fitted together and adjusted like inorganic 
particles of matter. No solutions are permanent until 
they come from the people themselves, by the modification 
of their wills, by the growing harmony of their own desires 
and aims. That is simply to say that the problems of 
democracy, like the aim of democracy, are personal. It 
was a homely form of expressing a fundamental truth that 
Josh Billings used when he said, " You will never have 
an honest horse-race until you have an honest human 



DEMOCRACY AS A RELIGIOUS IDEAL 35 

race." Society will not be right until the people are 
rig-ht. 

Social Tightness is that of which ancient teachers spoke, 
righteousness, a matter of the motives and will. Social 
welfare depends on social willing of the right, the good 
and the mutually helpful. And this means that men 
must not only know the right ; they must love it ardently, 
desire it supremely and serve it faithfully. Herein lies 
the function of religion, to so interpret life that men see 
the good and the time, that they discover and acquire 
adequate motives, that their desires are stimulated so 
that they count dear nothing beside if only there may be 
realized the splendid ideal of social good, of the love of 
men, and their life in an ideal family of the divine. 

Education for democracy is education in the religious 
life, in living in and for the sake of a society that real- 
izes the divine ideal of a common life of love and serv- 
ice. The modern democratic ideal comes steadily closer 
to the fundamental ideal of the Christian religion, that 
men may live together as one great family. It accepts 
the religious concept that it is possible to have a so- 
ciety in which the spiritual relationships are the dom- 
inant ones. It accepts the teaching that we should call 
all men our brothers, basing our relationships, not on 
the accidents of rank or wealth or blood, but on the un- 
changing fact of the common life of the spirit in which 
we find ourselves all of one family. 

Therefore education for democracy is education in the 
life of the world-family. It is our attempt to-day to 
answer the prayer we have so long addressed, not to a 
king, but to a Father, " Thy Kingdom come " ; the prayer, 
not for a divine monarchy, but for a common family under 
the divine fatherhood. Ideally a family is a social insti- 
tution founded on self-giving love and devoted to the 
giving of lives to the world and their development in the 
world. Its causes for being, if it has any sound and 



S6 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

enduring basis, are spiritual. Its purpose, if it is to be 
redeemed from sensuality and from sordid selfishness, must 
be spiritual, that children may grow as persons, may find 
their full world and be able to live in it.^ A democracy 
is an extension of this smaller ideal society. It is a 
larger family, not governed by some splendid paternal 
leader, for a family is not governed by a leader, but, like 
every good family, governed by a common will of goodness 
and love. 

Democracy involves liumanity^s sternest discipline. 
Living together in love — that is, paying the full measure 
of the identification of our own lives with the good of 
all other lives — is a wonderfully beautiful concept but 
a terribly difficult task. It is not easy even in a family 
where many instincts aid and where education has been 
strengthening the will from the very beginning. It is 
infinitely harder in the larger human family, composed of 
all kinds of people, likable and otherwise, good and bad, 
pleasant and unpleasant, intelligent and untouched by 
the spirit of life. We talk much about the democratic 
spirit to-day and seem to think that we are democratic 
because we ride in the street car with the man in his 
working jeans, because we stand with him at the polls. 
But how much deeper we must go to live a life of family 
devotion with all, to make our lives part of the common 
life! 

EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY IN RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

Evidently education for democracy must begin with 
the very roots of life, with the springs of character and 
will, of ideals and motives. It must stimulate us to 
willingness to meet in practice all the demands of its 
ideals, to pay the full price of democratic living, that 
is, not alone adjusting ourselves to living with others but 

1 This concept is developed and applied in the author's " Religious 
Education in the Family," University of Chicago Press, 1916. 



DEMOCRACY AS A RELIGIOUS IDEAL 37 

controlling ourselves to living for others and for all 
others. Education for democracy involves training all 
lives to social efficiency and social devotion. Surely it is 
not a mistake to call all competent training, directed to 
these ends, religious education ! It is immediately of im- 
portance to ascertain whether current education is directed 
to these ends. 

Any adequate program of education for the future 
mill involve a re-interpretation of education. The les- 
son of the current moral assize of the world is surely, 
first of all, that neither nations nor individuals can live 
for themselves alone ; self-interest as the guiding principle 
of life has broken down ; our plans of education — whether 
in terms of individual industrial efficiency or in terms of 
individual erudition — have failed and so equally has our 
individualistic religion, in terms either of dogmatism or 
of institutionalism. Education with its dawning con- 
sciousness of social idealism is relating itself to social real- 
ity and is looking forward to a coming social order domi- 
nated by new ideals. Are we not now facing that social 
order in which all may live in unity and the joy of com- 
mon service? Have we not practically abandoned the mis- 
leading biological analogy which interpreted life in terms 
of bitter struggle, of progress only by survival, and have 
we not come to see the greater and more imperative law 
of the organized world, that life is found in self-giving? 
Competition is of the past : our individualistic morality 
has crumbled under present social strains. We are 
already in a new world and for its order, its demands, 
new motives are imperatively needed. Our world has come 
almost to suicide through loyalty to the principle of 
selfishness ; the new world waits for those who are learning 
to live socially and therefore not simply unselfishly but 
with the spirit of the larger social self. 

A program of education for the future will include 
the following characteristics: (a) The stimulation of all 



38 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

social development in the direction of life's highest values. 
Education will be guided by value-consciousness; what is 
most worth while for all will determine the goal to which 
all are stimulated. To the modern mind religion is our 
consciousness of the meaning and worth of life. If this 
is true education will be under the illumination of the 
religious concepts and ideals of a people, (b) The 
motivation of each life by an adequate and developing 
value-consciousness ; this will mean such a sense of the 
worth of the life of all as shall lead one effectively to live 
for that worth. The religious life is the life which is 
governed by such a consciousness.^ The ultimate purpose 
of all education must be to develop persons whose gov- 
erning motives are religious, who are wise enough to live 
in the light of the total meaning of life, (c) The deter- 
mination of the mechanism of life by the aim of life; 
recognition that the tools of living are of subsidiary value 
and importance to the product of life. We never can 
have a real educational program until we have a society 
which really controls and uses the mechanism of living as 
means of enriching the life of all. This implies an intel- 
ligent social order, one in which purpose deliberately 
formulates its program. In the end it would mean a 
religious social order, (d) The right of society to self- 
realization in lives. Whatever hinders persons from 
growth as persons is a social crime. ^ Whatever hinders 
unity of social action for growth is a crime against each 
one. Society must be organized for its own ends, for 
the sake of and in order to produce the possible society. 

PERSONAL RIGHTS IN DEMOCRACY 

Religious education plans the organization of society 
for purposes of spiritual growth ; it demands the scrutiny 

1 Cf. George A. Coe in " A Social Theory of Religious Education," 
(Scribners, 1917). 

2 " Whoever causes one of these little ones to stumble . . ." Jesus. 



DEMOCRACY AS A RELIGIOUS IDEAL 39 

and the determination of all life's processes as educational 
processes under religious motives, (a) The right of each 
person to social realization. Whatever hinders the indi- 
vidual from the joyous, stimulating experience of unity 
and self-expression in the life of all robs him of life itself. 
To educate men in selfishness is to withhold from them 
the larger part of their lives, to cramp experience into 
the minute segment of self instead of expanding it in 
the wide circle of the social whole. Social realization 
really means full participation in all one's world, for this 
society stretches in every direction. It includes all the 
splendid souls of the past whose fellowship and example 
is our heritage; it embraces all bearers of the light in all 
lands everywhere ; it makes a part of our own circle all 
who now live for truth or die for freedom. The develop- 
ment of power to know and to enter into this rich and 
stimulating society is no small part of the task of religious 
education. To live here is to discover life's true values 
in persons, is to see clearly its abiding elements that 
remain unchanged by the wrack of time, is to grasp the 
central ideal of democracy that the life of all, like the 
life of one, consists in qualities of personality and that the 
end and purpose of life is to discover and develop these 
qualities, these worths. Religious education seeks by ac- 
tual experience in social living, by the stimulating ideals 
of large and enriching lives, by the push of the historic 
ideals of the race, by the cultivation of prophetic ideal- 
ism, to guide each life to the discovery, the realization and 
the enriching of all life, (b) The right of all, especially 
of the young, to immediate, practicable instruction in the 
method of living at this time. Motives and ideals are es- 
sential but they must be formed in the individual's own 
experience ; they must grow out of the realities of living. 
We have tried, too long, to deliver motives to children ; 
we must try to develop them by directing the child's actual 
experience in living his own life as a religious life, (c) 



40 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

The right to training in the methods which social expe- 
rience has indicated as the best in reahzing our common 
social purpose. It will gradually develop a science of a 
religious society. 

The peculiar present task of religious education lies in 
the fact that for us at this time the only practicable life 
is the religious life. All other motives have proved mis- 
leading ; all other methods evidently are suicidal. Self- 
interest makes self-realization impossible because it inhib- 
its social realization. Social efficiency in terms of a com- 
petitive struggle leads only, by battlefields — military or 
industrial — to social annihilation. The only possible 
way that all can even live to-day is the self-giving wa}^ 
abandoning the policy of developing the things of life 
solely as tools of gain, and definitely adopting a program 
of common service and enriching efficiency, finding the self 
in realizing the life of all. 

Religious education claims its primacy in the interest 
of men to-day, not for the preservation of religious tradi- 
tions, nor principally because of the rights of the individ- 
ual to his religious heritage, but because the salvation of 
society lies this way and no other, no other sort of so- 
ciety is possible but one in which the individual lives un- 
der religious motives. Such a society is possible only as 
lives are trained for this life, and the training is so impor- 
tant that it ought to be the first concern of society to- 
day. 

All who take seriously the problems of the future of 
democracy will turn their attention first to children ; they 
will see in them the society of to-morrow. And, with the 
children, they will set first the needs of the life of the 
spirit. They will not make training in religious knowl- 
edge, ideals and habits an incidental part of education ; 
it will come to be the most important because it deter- 
mines the ideals and wills of these growing persons ; it 
forms their characters, and thus decides everything be- 



DEMOCRACY AS A RELIGIOUS IDEAL 41 

sides. All who consider the future of democracy will con- 
sider with great care the agencies and the methods of this 
religious training. They will seek to develop the agencies 
to the highest possible efficiency; they will inquire with 
great care as to the kinds of materials which are being 
used. They will see that the stories told to children may 
tremendously affect the whole character of the future, 
that the religious concepts gained in childhood may be- 
come the social realities of to-morrow. They will cease 
to think of religious education as the occasional interest 
of a few faddists ; they will see it as our most important 
present duty with relation to the future of society. 



CHAPTER IV 

RELIGION IN DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION 

The method of training for life in a democracy is edu- 
cational ; the motive which fits for life in a democracy is 
religious. 

Education for democracy is social training under a 
spiritual interpretation of life and for the whole of social 
living. This preparation for living on the plane of life's 
highest values we choose to call religious education. But 
the phrase " religious education " misleads many ; at least, 
it still requires much explanation, for, often, it means 
nothing beyond instruction in theology and creeds or 
training in loyalty to ecclesiastical institutions. It is 
necessary, first, to distinguish between instruction about 
religion and religious education ; and then it may be help- 
ful to see the inter-relation and mutual dependence of 
education and religion in democracy. 

There is no reason to believe that a man will be a better 
democrat because he has read or even memorized a dic- 
tionary of religion. There is no evidence that, of itself, 
knowledge about religion either makes a religious person 
or a better citizen. The cynical assertion that religion 
has nothing to do with politics is entirely just and accu- 
rate if by religion is meant either pure pietism or mere 
information about religion. But the assertion is false 
when it means that life in a democracy has nothing to 
do with religion, or that religion has nothing to do with 
democracy. For religion is an ideal and spirit of life 
which determines the mode of life, and democracy is an 
ideal and spirit of social life which determines the mode 

of social life for a people. 

42 



RELIGION IN DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION 43 

Education for democracy is religious because democ- 
racy is a religious concept. Religion and democracy can- 
not be separated. Education for one must include the 
other. It is impossible to be an irreligious democrat. 
This is evident if we accept the definitions of democracy 
already stated and if, beside them, we place the modern 
definition of religion, as one's interpretation of the mean- 
ing and value of life. For it is precisely upon this valua- 
tion of life that democracy is based. Christianity and 
democracy accept personality as the supreme aim in exist- 
ence, as that for which society is organized. Christianity 
is the gospel of democracy, and democracy is the demon- 
stration of Christianity. Education in Christianity will 
consist in instruction in the ideals and training in the art 
of living in a society of common goodwill; it will be edu- 
cation in the way or mode of the society of the follow- 
ers of Jesus, in the life of the democracy of the spirit. 
Education for democracy is education for social life based 
on a concept of supreme values in personality, of society 
as existing for spiritual ends. Therefore such education 
is, of necessity, religious in character, in its ideals, in its 
aims, for it has to do with and it is determined by definite 
historic religious facts, by religious experiences and by 
concepts of spiritual values. Such education, then, is 
religious education, that is, education as determined by 
the fact of dealing with religious persons and being di- 
rected toward a religious end. 

It is not easy to overcome fixed verbal connotations. 
Religion has meant either creed, credulity or ecclesiasti- 
cism to so many and democracy has so long meant no 
more than a political form that it is difficult to realize 
their unity and fundamental identity. But it is not diffi- 
cult to take the first step in realizing that our present- 
day life makes demands on us that can be met only in the 
spirit of religion, that it calls for sacrifices under devo- 
tion to spiritual ideals. It is not difficult to see that a 



44 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

society which fully practiced the social ideals of Jesus ^ 
would be a true democracy. It is not difficult to see that 
if the young are to be prepared for a society of that char- 
acter their education must be religious in character and 
include religion in its content. Religious education be- 
comes a fundamental need in democracy. Is our think- 
ing of religion ready for this use? Can we conceive of 
education in which religion really functions? 

Education for democracy is religious because the very 
concept of education is religious. That is still a hard 
saying to many. There still remain, amongst those who 
are supposed to be educated, those who think of religion 
as no more than a matter of superstition. And there 
are those who regard education as no more than an arro- 
gant assumption of knowledge destructive of that cred- 
ulity which they call faith and which they imagine to be 
religion. 

Clear thinking on the relations of religion and educa- 
tion is fundamentally important. We have not yet 
passed from the controversy which presupposed a con- 
flict between the two. Education is still suspected of 
proffering knowledge as a substitute for religion.^ But 
the large tasks before us in training the society of the 
future call for the light of all our intelligence ; they call 
for the alliance of all the forces of the higher life. 

1 One thinks of his life and teaching as a demonstration and 
elucidation of his answer to Pilot's query and Socrates' search, 
"What is truth? What is the supreme worth in life?" 

2 At a recent convention a speaker vehemently denounced religious 
education, citing the moral defalcation of Germany in evidence; 
he confounded German technical training with education and the 
German systems of *' religionsunnterricht " with religious education ; 
the first is an excellent example of a system of instruction devoid 
of that spirit and that spiritual aim which are essential to education; 
the second is an example illustrating the difference between knowl- 
edge about religion and religious education. 



RELIGION IN DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION 45 



AN IMAGINARY CONFLICT 

Ignorance is the mother of much eloquence. Freedom 
from knowledge often gives liberty of utterance. Simple 
information has ended many controversies and wisdom has 
stopped yet more. The ancient debate on the supposed 
conflict between education and religion lacks vigor to- 
day because deeper understanding reveals harmony and 
unity where once only conflict seemed to exist. But just 
as the weeds of foolish controversy flourish wherever there 
are areas of ignorance so there are not lacking to-day 
those who will ask, with much wise wagging of heads, 
whether the " heart " is not endangered by " the head," 
whether knowledge is not the foe of grace and even 
whether one can go to college and still be a religious per- 
son. 

It is alleged that the processes of modern education de- 
feat the purposes of religion. One hears pathetic stories 
of young people who have gone up to college, their hearts 
warm with religious zeal, only to have the fires forever 
quenched. They have graduated, we are told, spiritual 
wrecks. They return devoid of interest in the aff'airs of 
the home church. Some strange paralysis, called educa- 
tion, has come over their spiritual lives. They are re- 
garded with pity mingled with awe. The disastrous 
process of religious decay seems very simple to the quiet 
souls at home; these young people have changed for the 
worse ; education has wrought their spiritual undoing. 

Usually those who denounce education as inimical to 
religion know neither the one nor the other. By educa- 
tion they mean some strange fantasy of popular crea- 
tion, a soulless creature constructed of cold facts, lifting 
its arrogant head in proud independence of God and 
goodness. But by religion they mean something often 
infinitely worse, a system of theories about the universe, 
human destiny and supernatural beings — rigid, median- 



46 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

ical and unrelated to life. Religion, in the mouths of 
such debaters, means theology, and, of course, their own 
theology, the height of which is dependent on its narrow- 
ness. 

That there is conflict between two such concepts no one 
can doubt. Even if education were such a cold, blood- 
less and largely useless compound of knowledge, it would 
still be in conflict with superstition. It would oppose 
theories with facts and it would shed light on the dark 
places in the human mind. And as knowledge grows 
from more to more it would naturally come to pass that 
truth, even though it be bloodless, would oppose untruth. 
Growing knowledge would mean, as Tenuyson says, grow- 
ing reverence, and that would mean opposition toward 
irreverence and especially opposition toward that blatant 
irreverence that assumes to comprehend and set the bounds 
for the infinite within its little brain, that dares to declare 
a monopoly, or at least a patent, on God. 

While practically all the opposition to education which 
is based on alleged religious grounds, arises with and is 
sustained by ignorant people, there remains much doubt 
and hesitation on the part of many intelligent persons 
as to the relations of the two. Their difficulties arise at 
the point of partial knowledge. They have identified edu- 
cation with scientific research and they have been accus- 
tomed by tradition to think of science as in opposition to 
religion. Seldom has any fixed idea had greater currency 
than that of " the conflict of religion and science " has 
had in the churches. It has been conceived, not as an 
historic process but as a condition inherent in the nature 
of things. Moreover scientific research, fostered by edu- 
cational agencies, has trimmed away so many concepts 
that were once supposed to be essential parts of religious 
belief that there is a strong suspicion whether one can be 
a scientist and still be a religious person. Often that sus- 
picion is sufficient reason for condemning all higher edu- 



RELIGION IN DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION 47 

cation for it is generally held that the colleges are re- 
sponsible for the spread of the scientific spirit. Of course 
all thoughtful persons realize that science has not undone 
religion ; on the contrary much has been gained, and noth- 
ing essential has been lost, for we are simply substituting 
facts for theories. A singular situation is revealed when 
we consider the popular attitude toward science in de- 
partments of interest other than the religious. No more 
of faith is involved in biology than in medicine; yet some- 
how — perhaps because our immediate interests are so 
real — we have unreservedly accepted science as to the 
healing of our own bodies while we hesitate to accept it 
as to the history of those bodies. 

It may seem to many that the conflict between religion 
and science is over. That is true in certain communities 
and amongst a certain class of people. But it is far from 
being true everywhere. Let a preacher so much as men- 
tion Evolution or even the name of Charles Darwin in a 
Baptist pulpit — or almost any other pulpit — in the 
rural South or Southwest, and he will find himself swept 
away in a storm of orthodox wrath.^ The ranter and the 
demagogue make their living by persistent appeals to 
prejudice of this kind. Denunciations of science are their 
stock in trade and ridicule of education their reliance for 
applause. Many good people in their blindness imagine 
they are defending God by opposing science. 

But even though the victory were won, even though 
there were complete reconciliation between science, as the 
word of education, and religion as the teaching of the 
churches, much still remains to be done. It is not enough 
to think of these as two forces which can exist side by 
side in the same world, the important step is to realize 

1 Only recently a school principal in a Southern city was dismissed 
for " favoring Darwinism," and another in another city for teaching 
geology in a manner that conflicted with a literal interpretation of 
Genesis. 



48 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

the unity and mutual dependence of religion and educa- 
tion. 

Now, in truth, one might as well talk of conflict be- 
tween the climate and the weather as to discuss warfare 
between religion and education. When both are known 
in their simple, essential meanings they are seen not as 
two distinct ideas and activities but as one and the same. 

Religion is an ideal as to the meaning of life, humanity 
and the universe which is so inspiring that it stimulates 
men to seek the realization of the ideal. Education is 
this religious ideal endeavoring to find reality in persons 
and in the social whole. Religion presents a concept of 
life and destiny ; education offers a program for its real- 
ization. Thus religion is the force behind all education ; 
education is religion in one of its great activities. Once 
accept in its fullness the religious view of the nature and 
destiny of our race; once see the religious vision of a 
united, loving common society rejoicing in fullness of 
powers and in the riches of inner wealth, then the educa- 
tional program of man's development is the natural and 
inevitable attempt to realize a religious society. 

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY " RELIGIOUS "? 

Of course one is here thinking of religion in its broad 
and inclusive meanings, as the great, vital principle that 
in some measure marks all faiths and comes to a rich 
flowering in Christianity. Religion historically has been 
a slowly developing concept of the universe ; it has been 
a gradual unfolding of the meaning of human life and its 
relations to all other life and to all time. Man has been 
answering his own question, What does life mean and 
what is it worth ? Both question and answer steadily have 
deepened their significances. Out of the answers have 
come the creeds and forms of religion. A creed has a 
religious character but it is not religion ; it is a f onnal 
statement of a point of view. It is commonly a succinct 



RELIGION IN DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION 49 

presentation of thoughts about rehgion, and, certainly it 
is almost always a record of a compromise between diverse 
opinions. But opinions about religion are not religion, 
often they are not even religious. 

The educational concept of religion. That spirit and 
ideal which we call religion views man as set in the eternal 
processes of the universe, with an eternity behind in which 
he has grown, and an eternity before in which he yet may 
grow. It believes in life without limitations ; it sets no 
boundaries before, because it can trace none in the past. 
It builds its hopes for the future on the progress of the 
past and the promise of an ideal wathin. It sees man al- 
ready conscious of a life that in its outreach and aspira- 
tion knows no limit. Man is religious because he has 
eternity in his heart. The law of growth is in his na- 
ture. 

Where life means growth, where its worth is just in the 
chance to grow, religion finds its hope coming to realiza- 
tion in the processes of education ; faith becomes loyalty 
to the laws of personal growth in earnest endeavor to 
secure to all men everywhere the chance to grow to the 
fullness of the divine ideal. Then religion can only be 
expressed in the educational terms of all-inclusive develop- 
ment, and education can be expressed only in the religious 
terms of fulfilling the divine plan of growth by coopera- 
tion with the eternal powers of life. 

The religious person is that one who takes life in terms 
of growth, whose hope for all life is that all may grow 
into closer hannony as all approach the ideal life, and 
whose plan for society is its development into the loving 
family of the all-Father. He finds he is constantly seek- 
ing thus the educational ideal ; religion gives him an edu- 
cational concept of life's processes and its plan. 

The religious motive is essential in any competent plan 
of education. If life means limitless possibilities of spir- 
itual social relations and development, how are these 



50 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

realized? Life answers: The way is long but the path 
is plain ; where life is there is growth. Perfection is not 
imposed; it is slowly attained. Progress is the outward 
expression of the inner force of life. It is the vital pow- 
ers reaching out in new directions, finding new relations, 
establishing new abilities. Growth is part of a universal 
process which we call life. This life of personality is part 
of the great all-inclusive life that moves forward, develop- 
ing and growing. The law that is written on the blade of 
grass and on the body of man is written not less on his 
higher nature. Life comes from life and grows by the 
processes of life. When this universal and divine law 
of life as growth is applied to persons we call the process 
education. After all education is simply our attempt to 
work with God in growing men. 

Educational endeavor all through the past has grown 
out of a religious philosophy of life. Aspiration is pos- 
sible only where life has higher possibilities. Opportunity 
for realization is afforded to all only when all life has 
spiritual values. The view of man as a part of a uni- 
verse of life, a being made " to grow and not to stop," 
has fostered every effort to furnish him the agencies and 
stimuli of growth. The early church promoted educa- 
tion not simply as means of learning but as a method of 
life. Schools were founded not because she needed a 
trained leadership alone but because, wherever she was 
the guardian and exponent of true religion, she must both 
preach and teach ; she must both deliver and demonstrate 
the gospel that men may have life. Her one great mes- 
sage was that of Life; wherever the light burned clear 
she illumined the path of life to men ; wherever she was a 
voice and not an echo she called them to larger life. The 
church, like her Master, exists that men " might have 
life and might have it more abundantl3\" She is bound, 
not alone to proclaim deliverance from death, but to show 



RELIGION IN DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION 51 

men the way into life through the truth. The funda- 
mental articles of her creed are that God is life, and that 
men may grow to His likeness. Therefore she not only 
believes in education, she must be an educator. Nor is 
this all, every true agency of education — in the high 
sense of light that leads into life — shares in the divine 
task of the church. The religious quality of any insti- 
tution will be the measure of enriching it gives to the 
lives of men. Such a test will put the college and uni- 
versity into a new category. Out of a religious passion 
they were born ; only a religious aim can adequately ex- 
press their present social function. 

The university, born of man's free search for life's 
meaning, became the torch-bearer of the church ; the 
schools followed. History is a record of religion — this 
passion for complete life — stirring in the hearts of men, 
expressing itself crudely, perhaps at times cruelly, often 
blindly, but still struggling after more light and life and, 
therefore, at last crowning all institutions with the schools 
for the people. To-day the school stands out as the 
leading social institution of our common life. We often 
lose sight of the fact but, nevertheless, the school is re- 
ligion applied to life; the school is religion in the flower 
and the fruit. Every public school is an expression of 
society's essentially religious faith that a child may grow 
and that the first debt which society owes to him is to 
provide him full opportunity for growth as a member of 
society. Every school, too, is an expression of the re- 
ligious motive which delights to sacrifice, to give life to 
others, for every such school simply means the united 
sacrifice of each community in order that all children may 
have the chance to grow. A public school is a social 
syndication of idealism and sacrifice invested in the lives 
of to-day for the social life of to-morrow. It is the ex- 
pression of our democratic creed. 



52 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 



RELIGION THE MOTHER OF EDUCATION 

There is no way of accounting for the phenomenon of 
modern education apart from the ideals and spirit of 
religion. Why should we pay taxes for public educa- 
tion except under the recognition of a higher law of obli- 
gation to give life to all? Why should we withhold our 
children from bread-winning cooperation in the family 
except under the imperative call to give them the chance 
to grow? Why should we expect and encourage large 
gifts to colleges from persons of means, except that they 
have the vision of the contribution which the college must 
make to life? They see the gift not as a monument in 
buildings but as an act of obedience to the heavenly vi- 
sion of youth growing into richer living. And this reli- 
gious ideal is precisely the spirit of democracy ; it is de- 
votion to the enrichment of life. Education cannot be 
democratic without this religious faith in life, nor can 
it be religious without the democratic purpose of devotion 
to the life of all. 

The inadequacy, for democracy, of much education lies 
vn its irreligious character. This lies not in any espe- 
cial lack of religion in the content but in the absence of 
a high aim based on the vision of human social possibili- 
ties and values. In so far as we depart from the essen- 
tial inspiration of all educational effort, that is, the spirit 
of organized endeavor to give to all persons the fullness of 
their lives in a spiritual universe, we depart from true 
education and indulge in mere instruction and trick-train- 
ing. Lacking this vision our colleges become mere mills 
for making money-making machines, business houses to 
turn out manufacturers, chemists, engineers, wrought out 
of the material that God meant should become manhood. 

The mockery and disappointment of modern education 
is precisely that it often has lost its soul in exploiting the 
world; it is more interested in mechanics than in men 



RELIGION IN DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION 53 

because it lacks this higher and wider interpretation of 
religion. We call it training for social efficiency and we 
limit it to the acquisition of proficiency in a few of the 
tricks and habits of making a living. In our insistent 
emphasis on the practical we have almost persuaded our- 
selves that the business of school and college is all de- 
tennined by the needs of trades and professions. We 
would reorganize the whole curriculum at the demand of 
the factory. 

At present we scarce have any system of education, but 
rather a number of sporadic attempts to teach some of 
the many things that will develop efficiency in making a 
larger or bigger living. Herbert Spencer, re-acting from 
the traditionalism and the proud impracticability of the 
English universities, has with clever words, intended only 
as an argument for the practical preparation of work- 
ers, succeeded in making us ashamed of the cultural ele- 
ments so that we apologize for everything that does not 
have a wage or a salary potency. His popular treatise 
on " Education " was a much-needed call to develop life 
through actually useful training; but we have taken his 
means as our end. 

Our tendency has been to sacrifice the man to the ends 
of manufacturing. The scholar's pride in the intellect 
has given place to the technician's pride in the training 
of hands. This we call vocational training, as though 
the only vocation, the final and all inclusive one, was that 
which cries aloud in the market places and factories. 
Such training loses sight of the values of personality; it 
develops only workers, efficient machines ; it defeats its own 
purpose and throws the engineer under the boilers. It 
consumes the very powers without which the worker can 
never be efficient. That which industry needs is precisely 
that which the individual needs, more man, larger and more 
developed personality. Work must have not alone nimble 
fingers nor alone a brain nimble with figures but a life 



54 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

that has power, has found itself, can grow and Is motived 
with the passion for growth. 

Hard, practical and biting events recently have 
smashed some of our favorite educational theories. For 
over a generation we pointed to the educational system of 
Germany, the most perfectly organized mechanism for 
making efficient workers, artizans, citizens and parts of 
the machinery of the state. Now the system has come to 
its supreme test. It has demonstrated both its efficiency 
and its insufficiency. It has built up a wonderful ma- 
chine — without conscience or soul. We have the wheels, 
but there is lacking the spirit of life, the spirit of human 
feeling, of an affection and aspiration that goes beyond 
the machine and a soul that counts not gain or dominion 
first of all. It has demonstrated its diabolical possibili- 
ties. It converted a nation into a machine and when the 
devil was ready to use it then it obeyed his will. 

The spectacle of a national failure of education at the 
very springs of life only throws into high relief that which 
is true in our own country. We have applied the fruitage 
of scientific training wholly to the tools of making a liv- 
ing, we have bent our energies wholly to making the two 
blades of grass supplant the one and the two factories 
reap four times the profit of one. We have cared naught 
for making each man in himself worth twice what he was 
before ; we have cared naught for the inner sources of life's 
guidance and refreshing. We have been so intensely prac- 
tical that we have developed the menacing machine of edu- 
bated workers who have all the power of the engine and 
none of the wisdom of an engineer, who can run fac- 
tories and great systems of business but lack either wis- 
dom or power to run themselves. They know where they 
can make business go but no one knows where thev will 
drive themselves, nor whither they may drift. 

The present danger is that of a short-measure educa- 
tion, excellent so far as it goes but failing to go far 



RELIGION IN DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION 55 

enough, to include enough to save itself. It is good food 
— but without saving salt. It is well-organized and 
highly efficient, but wholly insufficient, because it deals 
only with the surface of life and fails to touch the springs 
of action, to develop ideals and motives. It is therefore 
efficient to make skilled organizers of capital but insuffi- 
cient to save them from social piracy, to make chemists 
but unable to save them from poisoning the purchaser of 
food, able to teach all to read but powerless to develop 
the choice of the good or to check the tides of moral 
poison. 

THE SAVING SPIEIT 

What is needed? Shall we abandon all education and 
call it a failure, owning that it does but whet the edge 
of knavery, that it does but sharpen the tooth of raven- 
ing beasts of prey and turn our whole system into social 
shambles where each may rend and devour.'^ Does educa- 
tion tend only to make nobler beasts, more efficient fac- 
tors whose energies may be turned to ill and catastrophe.'^ 
Do we not see other signs.'' Have we not made much prog- 
ress toward social adjustment and development and have 
not the steps of progress been under the leadership com- 
monly of educated men and women.? Turn to the settle- 
ments, turn to the groups of men and women who are pas- 
sionately devoting their lives to meeting great social and 
moral issues, who are waging the real fight for right and 
giving to their fellows larger life. Who are they but col- 
lege graduates .'^ They are a fraternity of sacrificial, ef- 
ficient service. They are examples of education as a proc- 
ess of the development of powers and their application to 
personal and social aims. These people have been trained 
and developed, not that they might gain from life but 
that they might give life. Here we have the very essence 
of the religious interpretation of education, a process of 
the directed development of life into fullness for the 



56 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

sake of the full and efficient life of common service. 

This spirit and this alone will save our system of edu- 
cation and save our educated men and women. In this 
spirit is the natural expression of religion in education 
and it is the effective mode by which religion becomes a 
part of education. It comes not alone by information on 
the history and literature of religion ; these have their 
place only in the degree and are valuable to the extent 
that they succeed in inspiring this ideal, in that they 
make us feel the force of past persons and days when this 
spirit prevailed with men. The religious character of 
education depends on what it makes life mean to us ; it is 
tested in the resultant spirit and purpose in any life. 
Even though men carry on their lips catalogues of 
prophets and martyrs they easily go out to be despoilers 
and brigands of society, blind devouring beasts who 
should be shepherds and saviors. But where life means 
service, where one is governed by the democratic motive, 
the great of all days become real through the fellowship 
of service and religion becomes, not a thin-spun theory, 
but a real experience in living. 

No other spirit, than that of devotion to the common 
good, can hold young people content through the toil 
and waiting of student days. The immediate world offers 
tempting rewards ; the future seems uncertain : but it is 
evidently worth while to wait if thereby growth is en- 
sured, if waiting and working means greater efficiency and 
thus a larger contribution to the common life. 

This spirit gives meaning to all studies and disciplines. 
The spiritual possibilities of life interpret the universe. 
Science becomes an open book of revelation ; the impres- 
sive story of evolution takes on new significance with its 
promise for man and its invitation to aid in his develop- 
ment. Given a purpose in personality to the universe it 
takes over the forms of beauty ; without that purpose the 
more we know of the universe the more it mocks us with 



RELIGION IN DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION 57 

its meaningless mechanisms. To see a life purpose in the 
growth of personality is to give the color of that purpose 
to the whole world. 

What, then, is the place of religion in the course of 
studies? It reveals purpose in life. It opens doors into 
the yesterdays and reveals men and women who lived for 
the purposes of spiritual service, for the divine good of 
humanity. Their shining vision draws us on. We feel 
race movements under religious inspiration ; we find our- 
selves as part of the life of peoples moving toward God. 
We see, not dynasties and statecraft, but leaders and mul- 
titudes who counted not their lives dear if only mankind 
might find freedom and fullness of life. They poured out 
their aspirations, and to us they are not merely forms for 
literary criticism, they are the very breath of the life 
of other days. Our race heritage and our race pressure, 
moving toward God, becomes our possession and our 
power. 

Thus religion becomes a spirit of life, a way of think- 
ing about life and a way of living. Religion is not only 
that which is studied in the biblical and theological 
courses ; it is that which rises to guide life in any course 
when the real meanings and uses of living are seen. The 
special courses in religion are designed only to furnish 
through specific and easily distinguished instances the clew 
to the interpretation of all fields of knowledge. They 
are not the curriculum compartments into which religion 
is segregated; they are the sources and springs from 
w^hich a spirit and interpretation of all knowledge and all 
training flows into every department. 

This spirit of religion which makes life a means of serv- 
ing the life of all is that which saves the modern college. 
It makes it an institution of ideals in a material age. It 
makes it an institution of religion, a minister to the souls 
of men, a means of salvation in a selfish world. The cure 
for the lust of office, spoliation of the weak, robbery of 



58 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

the poor, oppression of childhood, for the mad lust of 
hate and the black night of lust lies neither in the illumi- 
nation of knowledge nor in the control of legislation and 
regulation, but in that which determines our ideals, in- 
spires our wills and guides our conduct. It lies in wills 
that will the right, hearts that love the good and true, 
emotions that stir toward right paths. The new day 
waits for new man, and men are made new as their spirits 
are renewed within by the vision of loving devotion to the 
common good. 

Religion is, then, such an interpretation of life as alone 
can make education sufficiently broad, high and vital for 
the world of to-day. It discloses a society worth being 
educated, a range of possibilities realizable only through 
ordered growth, motives that stimulate toward growth, a 
vision of possibilities of usefulness that call for the devel- 
opment of powers. Moreover, religion furnishes the 
method of personal development. It teaches the supreme 
lesson, that this pathway of service is also the way of 
self-realization. The life that freely gives itself fully 
finds itself. Service is the secret of strength and the 
source of power. This way of devotion to ideals is the 
curriculum of personality. Here are the two methods of 
the religious life : the vision before leading on, the activ- 
ity at hand developing the power to follow the vision. 
This is the process of education, disclosing the truth and 
organizing experience in its realization. To be eff^ective 
education must be a religious experience ; to be real in 
society religion must reach us through these educational 
means, through revelation of truth and through experi- 
ence. And so, moved forward by the vision glorious, 
heartened by the glory of all that life means, gloriously 
pouring out life's flood in devotion to all, in common work 
with God, men are led forward in a continuous educational 
experience into that common, inclusive society, that fel- 
lowship of God and all men, which is the true democracy. 



CHAPTER V 

EDUCATION AND THE PROBLEMS OF DEMOCRACY 

The outstanding problems which must be met in the 
reaHzation of the democratic hope He in the realm of 
thought and feeling. We cannot have a democratic state 
until we have a people of the democratic spirit. 

Democracy will reign within before it is realized with- 
out. It will be the prevailing ideal of a people before it 
really prevails as a mode of social organization. To what 
degree can we count on the prevalence of the ideals of 
democracy .f^ This is very different from asking whether 
we, in America, are committed to democracy. By our 
political history, our national traditions and our public 
avowals we are a democracy. But the conversion of this 
outer form of government into a vital, controlling spirit, 
directing the lives of individuals and the relations of all 
persons, is a tremendous task. It is predicated on the 
possibilitiy of the conversion of the minds and wills of 
democracy. It is possible only when we have become ha- 
bituated to thinking in social terms. It means that the 
popular ideals of this age are democratic. To what ex- 
tent is this the case? 

Our first problem is to determine the degree to which 
democracy has become a prevailing ideal. Is this age 
already characterized hy the democratic ideal? The 
character of an age depends on its current ideals. The 
really important question whenever we would make a judg- 
ment of any period is, what were its dominating ideals? 
We cannot know its history until we know what is in its 
heart. But it is not easy to discover and describe the 

heart of an age. Ideals are always in flux and develop- 

59 



60 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

ment. While we are defining them others are reahzing 
them and advancing new ones. Every ideal has within it 
the power of destroying itself by fulfillment and enlarge- 
ment. Again, ideals tend to disguise themselves. The 
more compelling they are the less likely is it that we will 
confess them. We get only reflections of current ideals 
in literature and song; they are effective in active life 
before they take these forms. We must search for them 
in the activities of people, and not alone in the normal 
activities, but in those which seem to have special em- 
phasis or to be developments peculiar to their times. 
Looking over our own times we can hardly hesitate to 
recognize two outstanding social activities which have had 
unusual emphasis. They are social consciousness and 
education. 

Social consciousness is an evidence of the democratic 
ideal. Social consciousness is a term less concrete but 
much more accurate than " social amelioration " in de- 
scribing the activities of our times. Social service, social 
betterment, social rights, civic improvement and all the 
movements for improving conditions of living, for secur- 
ing to men and women fair wages, decent housing, leisure 
and recreation are all expressions of the social conscious- 
ness. They indicate the fact that we have come to realize 
not only that we live in a society and that we are a so- 
ciety, but that the life of this society is the most impor- 
tant of all human concerns. An awakening social con- 
sciousness is simply a dawning democratic ideal. Its ac- 
tivities are based on a sense of the values of people. It 
seeks to organize all society on the basis of those values. 
Just as democracy is government for the people by the 
powers of the people so this social activity is the attempt 
of the people to govern current life for the sake of people. 

It would be difficult to determine whether the demo- 
cratic ideal is an expression of the social spirit or social 
activity a manifestation of the spirit of democracy. They 



THE PROBLEiVIS OF DEMOCRACY 61 

are inseparable. Democracy is bound to extend itself be- 
yond the forms of political organization. In our social 
activity it is giving evidence of its vitality and power. 
Increasingly human values determine social forms, indus- 
trial conditions, the aesthetic and the religious life and thus 
give evidence of the extent to which the basic concepts of 
democracy develop in and rule the minds of men. 

Current educational activity is a revelation of current 
ideals. Amongst all the interests of the present age none 
more clearly reveals its ideals than that range of en- 
deavors which we group under education. While we are 
too near to form a judgment it is not unlikely that the 
period which hinges on the opening of the twentieth cen- 
tury will be known as the period of the educational em- 
phasis. Two things are certainly true ; first, that educa- 
tional activities constitute the largest single social invest- 
ment of energy, time and money of this period ; and, sec- 
ond, that this field has offered the largest opportunitiy to 
the free expression of the idealism of individuals. Here 
is the one thing which costs us more than any other and 
it is the one in which we find the largest and most lasting 
pleasure, in which we take the highest pride and upon 
which we are building our highest hopes. It would there- 
fore appear that to realize just what education means to 
this age would be to discover the dominant aim of the 
age. 

A brief discussion must suffice where an adequate one 
is quite impossible. Education is the greatest common 
faith of a free people. We have many sects but only one 
system of schools, in nearly all communities many churches 
but only one school. We have various political parties 
but all support our common educational system and their 
partisans send their children to the same schools. Here, 
because of agreement in common conviction, we syndicate 
our efforts and our means to support the agencies of 
education. No tax is more cheerfully paid, it makes no 



62 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

difference whether or not the citizen sends children to re- 
■^^iceive the benefits of the tax. The rich man forsakes his 
hoarding to endow the college and the poor man forgets 
his poverty to send his children there. 

EDUCATION EXPRESSES DEMOCRACY 

Not only does the age manifest devotion by united sup- 
port of education, it is now developing an intelligent pop- 
ular interest in the efficiency of the schools. We are 
beginning to sell books on education to people who are 
not professional educators. Lectures and public discus- 
sions receive popular support. The schools receive a 
growing measure of attention in the public press. And, 
far more important than these tendencies, we have wit- 
nessed a remarkable development of intelligent interest in 
and cooperation with the schools on the part of the people. 
The most definite evidence of this lies in the organization 
and service of the different types of clubs and societies 
organized as *' Parent-Teacher Associations," " School 
Clubs," etc. To-day, in nearly every American com- 
munity, there is to be found a society or club of some 
sort designed to bring the families, as an organized group, 
into cooperation with the school. Parents gather to be 
instructed on educational ideals and methods ; they 
organize to aid the school in its work ; they guard its 
interests and foster the improvement of its environment 
and of the conditions under which its pupils live. 

But why recite these endeavors in a discussion of the 
prevailing ideals of democracy .^^ Because these endeavors 
reveal the extent to which those ideals are already con- 
trolling action ; they show democracy directing society in 
public service. When in a community we find the families 
organized under a consciousness of unity of purpose with 
the schools, when men and women devote large areas of 
their time in united social efforts to make the school 
the efficient center of community development, there we 



THE PROBLEIVIS OF DEMOCRACY 63 

see a segment of democracy organized to secure the demo- 
cratic end — the development of persons — by the demo- 
cratic method — the free activities of persons. When 
the activities of these groups are examined we discover 
new indications of the growth of the spirit of democracy. 
We find that they are not organized so much to improve 
the efficiencies of the school in instruction ; rather they are 
directing themselves under a concept of the entire life of 
the community as interpreted in educational terms. They 
see the school as the center, but they concern themselves 
with playgrounds, parks, clean streets, the suppression 
of social plague spots, the regulation and development 
of amusements and recreation, the provision of objects 
and centers of art. All these activities grow out of the 
now rapidly developing conviction that the entire life 
of a community is constantly operating, educationally, to 
determine the development and the characters of men 
and women and especially of the young. Here then we 
have the democratic concept of social organization as 
determined by the needs of persons actually controlling 
organized social activities. 

Another important evidence of this tendency lies in 
the recent organization of movements for community 
betterment and coordination. In a word, we have come 
to an educational consciousness of community living. 
Democracy has led us to see beyond our streets and stores, 
our factories and marts, and has compelled us to think 
of these, not alone as factors in commercial success or as 
features for civic pride, but, more seriously, as active 
factors in determining lives, in promoting or retarding 
the great purpose of democracy, the growth of lives. 

We have come, also, to a clearer and deeper realization 
of the importance of the educational processes in the 
agencies of religion. We have coined and given wide 
currency to a new phrase, " religious education.'* We 
have realized the function of the church as that of the 



64 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

development of society, through the training of persons, 
into the divine ideal of a great common family. A new 
conscience for character comes into the churches under 
the ideal of democracy. It is an old concept that seemed 
to be almost lost for a long time. Now it is being 
restored and the church is expected to organize its life 
and direct its powers in order that men and women may 
become really godlike and society may reflect the divine 
goodness and love. Therefore the church gives the child 
a new place. It provides courses of training ; it prepares 
teachers and engages trained educators ; it erects special 
educational buildings and has already developed a con- 
siderable literature on religious education. The spiritual 
mind turns with new hope to these enterprises, looking 
on the child and, believing that he can grow normally 
into fullness of character, it looks forward to a world 
where all men know and love the truth, where they live 
for one another and find joy and peace. This is the 
spirit of democracy illuminated by the ideals of religion 
and counting on realization through the educational 
method. 

We cannot assert that the ideals of democracy wholly 
control life ; far from it ; but we can surely see the signs 
of developing control, promises on which we may base 
our certain hopes. And the hope is the more certain 
in that all this educational activity constantly includes, 
both in the content of the curriculum and still more in 
the nature of the activities, training in the ideals and the 
practice of democracy. And so to this extent, at least, 
we can see an answer to the question whether democracy 
has become a current popular ideal. 

Our second problem is that of developing the respon- 
sibilities of freedom over against the temptations of 
autocracy. There are types who would always rather be 
governed than exercise thought and effort in governing; 



THE PROBLEMS OF DEMOCRACY 65 

there are times for all when we sigh for some one to deter- 
mine conduct for us. Then there are evident advantages 
in dictatorship. One mind moves much more rapidly 
than a multitude. One mind ruling all can secure 
uniformity and unity of action. From the beginning of 
the great war Germany was the outstanding example of 
the absolute control of a large group of peoples through 
one autocratic dictatorship. The most serious difficulty 
of the Allies, next to their lack of preparation, was their 
democratic methods of procedure ; there were as many 
minds as there were nations and, then, within each nation 
there was a multitude of counselors which did not make 
either for unity of action or for expedition. To many ob- 
servers it seemed that the dictatorship had proved its su- 
perior efficiency. Undoubtedly it has superiority for cer- 
tain purposes. If aggression, domination and subjugation 
is the mission of a nation it had better have a dictator. 
But there seem to be advantages in dictatorship when 
the national energies are directed toward less reprehensible 
ends. The United States utilized a series of dictators 
in carrying on its \var program ; a food dictator, w^hose 
function has been largely advisory ; a press dictator who 
attempted to control what we shall know, and, apparently, 
what we shall think ; a ship-building dictator, and so on. 
The President steadily sought larger powers, amounting 
to dictatorship in many respects. It is true that such 
steps have been taken under the guise of the democratic 
method, the people permitting them and retaining the 
power to prevent. But the simple fact is that they are 
taken as leading to efficiency in conducting the war, and 
the grave question is, shall we always abandon democracy 
and turn to the leadership of dictators in every hour of 
national crisis? Do we take these steps because they 
are necessary or simply because they are the easy solutions 
of a problem.'^ 



66 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 



WHEN DEMOCRACY FAILS 

Democracy breaks down as a practical political method, 
or has to be modified at times because the political purpose 
is not always democratic and the people have not been 
trained for democracy. They have not so learned its 
arts as to be able to practice them under strain. To 
many democracy is only a political expedient to be 
dropped when another expedient will work better. Most 
people think only in terms of the present moment; they 
will do whatever the passing occasion seems to demand. 
They have not learned to take long views of affairs. They 
are unconscious of any need for a guiding philosophy and 
it has never occurred to them that " history is philosophy 
teaching by example." They know the history of institu- 
tions only in the most vague and disconnected manner. 
The movement in Roman history from republican institu- 
tions to absolutism, through the Caesars to the Kaiser 
concept, from freedom to fall, means nothing to them. 
Our politicians are not statesmen ; they scoff at the term 
as a newspaper man scoffs when termed a journalist. 
They scorn thinking and pride themselves on being prac- 
tical minded. Our political discussions are confined to 
men and immediate measures. It is little wonder we 
readily yield to the temptations of any undemocratic 
devices that promise to facilitate government. 

Trained intelligence must be our principal hope. They 
see the dangers and they have the larger confidence in 
democracy who understand the long conflict of humanity 
with absolutism, who see religion gradually emerging from 
the notion of a dictator deity to the leadership of a 
splendid Brother in the great Human family, from control 
by spiritual authority to institutional democracy, who 
see the many and long experiments of history with the 
gradual decline of monarchy and the passing of kings, 
who see peoples growing in the essential elements of power 



THE PROBLEMS OF DEMOCRACY 67 

and permanence in the degree that they are free and 
intelligent. Faith in democracy is founded on knowledge 
of humanity. The temptations of autocratic expedients 
are seen in the clear light of humanity's long experience. 
Such knowledge is the right and heritage of all in a 
democracy. Nor can we stop with knowledge; there 
must be training to meet the duties and strains of democ- 
racy, training determined in the light of our probable 
problems. This will include actual experience in social 
life which deliberately chooses the difficult path of democ- 
racy rather than the short cuts of autocracy, such 
experience as can be guided in the family and the school. 
Democracy is a dangerous experiment where it is only an 
experiment unguided by the wisdom gathered from the 
race experience and administered by persons untrained in 
its practice. 

Third, education must face the problem of nationalism 
versus individual freedom. We tend to set these two out 
objectively as opposites, thinking of the nation as a sep- 
arate entity and of individual freedom as a matter of 
separate absolutism in the personal realm. But in a 
democracy the nation is possible only because free men 
will to act in national capacities. The nation has no 
separate existence; it is not a something which confers 
freedom on the people ; it is their creation. And yet we 
must think in terms of our larger common life, as a nation. 
Democracy does involve loyalty to the larger group. 
Nor need that conflict with loyalty to freedom. The 
difference lies here: nationalism thinks of the nation as a 
power over the people ; democracy thinks of the nation as 
the power of the people. Nationalism calls on us to serve 
the state, defend the state, maintain its honor and enlarge 
its prestige; democracy calls on us to serve by means of 
the state, to use our collective capacities which are the 
state as a means of enriching and honoring all life. The 
problem is that of developing loyalties, a matter almost 



68 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

wholly neglected so far as the democratic motives and 
ideals are concerned. Our emotional stimuli are nearly 
all those which work just as well under a monarchy. We 
fail to develop feeling regarding the great aims of our 
national life. And yet the material is abundant ; parts of 
the Bible are saturated with the idealism of human respon- 
sibility in national life ; splendid passages occur in our 
American poets and essayists, as in Lowell, Emerson and 
Lincoln, not to mention others, as Mazzini and Burke. 
There is no dearth of opportunity nor of illustration in 
current life if only we have the vision to see our task, 
to conserve the loyalties in the lesser groups, to direct 
them in service, to discover the joys of sacrificial devotion 
to social ends and to lead these habits of loyalty and 
activity into the larger life. 



CHAPTER VI 

PROBLEMS OF WORLD LIVING 

The catalogue of world problems we need not attempt 
to exhaust but there are at least two which face democ- 
racy and which have forced us to realize their pertinency. 
First, is the very practical problem of securing human 
solidarity and harmony u/nder the ideals of personal 
freedom. How can the highest common interests be con- 
served without destroying personal freedom? 

This question comes to the front with increasing 
impressiveness as human life develops closer relationships. 
We struggle for the rights and delights of our individual 
selves in days when events are welding us into world unity. 
Civilization seems to mean the breakdown of individual 
living. Commerce weaves us into a world-fabric of mutual 
dependencies. Separateness of living disappears not only 
locally but nationally also. Shall we come into rigid 
uniformity under this new unity? The question lies at 
the heart of all endeavor for social welfare, for we seek 
something more than the organization of all persons into 
regiments living in hygienic apartments, well-fed and 
clothed, we seek the well-being that comes through the 
exercise of free wills. It lies at the basis of our discussion 
of social problems and our agitation for social justice. 
As Eucken says, " Justice is nothing other than the 
harmony of life incorporated into one's own volition." 

The problem of human freedom is as old as the race. 

It is a problem only because we are set in society, 

environed by innumerable other wills, equally free. It 

is the root of the ethical problem, for an ethical life is 

possible only when one is free to will and act, and 

69 



70 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

demonstrable only when there are other lives, other wills 
in relation to which one can act. It is Plato's great 
theme. He treats it so prominently because the Greeks 
were the first people to apply the conception of civic 
freedom. True, freedom meant for them the opportunity 
of all to live for and in the state, to be parts of the 
state. The civic limitations of their freedom raised the 
questions which Socrates faced, the right of each man 
to follow virtue, the good. In the assertion of personal 
freedom to seek the good and to serve the best Socrates 
and Jesus both passed through death. Socrates said, 
" Knowledge is virtue " ; Jesus, " Ye shall know the truth 
and the truth shall make you free." Men have come 
to know some part of the truth and to claim their heritage 
of freedom. Did they know all truth in the Socratic 
sense of knowing and in the Christ sense of truth there 
would be no problem of freedom under social relations. 
To Socrates knowledge included moral insight ; to Jesus 
truth included the conception of life in terms of love, as 
part of a universe conceived in infinite love. 

We to-day are likely to see only the darker features 
and to get an impression of a problem rather than a 
process. We see an irresponsible electorate blindly voting 
away its own soul ; selling its birthright and ours, too ; 
asserting its freedom to choose its own good, usually 
goods. We see cunning wedded to cupidity claiming free- 
dom to exploit us all, and loudly asserting the liberty 
of the weaker members of society to make bad and vicious 
bargains with the strong, the right of the socially disinte- 
grated to stay disintegrated and become the spoil of the 
integrated mighty ones. Individualism runs amuck under 
the fair guise of freedom. AVhat has the educational ideal 
to do with these conditions? 

We face in a new world-alignment the problem of human 
freedom in its largest significances: since in this modern 
integration of human interests social solidarity is abso- 



PROBLEMS OF WORLD LIVING 71 

lutely necessary, can it be attained under freedom? Is 
the German method of welding a people by the external 
pressure of authority the only way? Or is it possible 
that the fusing of purpose and effort will come from 
within, rising in the free wills of men ? If free men cannot 
will unity, if in freedom we cannot find a common social 
goodwill, democracy is doomed. 

The educational ideal has within it the solution of 
the problem of freedom under social relations. Firsts it 
recognizes the necessity of 'preparing men for the strain 
of freedoin. It seeks to provide for every man the oppor- 
tunity and the disciplines of self-discovery. Its modern 
emphasis is on social experience. It begins for the child 
with his organized association with other lives. It trains 
in social living through a society called a school. It 
develops knowledge through common experiences gained in 
this society. It constantly subjects every life to the 
training of adjustment to other lives. The subjects that 
are taught are the means of finding and perfecting con- 
tacts and adjustments with other lives and groups of lives. 
It develops habits of social relations. It trains the power 
of willing what one will do in the light of what others are 
doing or what should be done with or for others. It 
reveals the self through social experience. 

We cannot know what freedom means until we know 
this agent that would be free, until we learn to discriminate 
between the freedom of the will and the wild abandon 
of passion and lust, until we discover this self that ought 
to sit supreme like the charioteer over his steeds. The 
educational process brings men to know themselves as 
persons. It also trains men for freedom by the develop- 
ment of self-control. This free I is not free until it does 
as I may will, not as driven by the hot blast of hellish 
hate or swept along by greed or wild with fanaticism. 
The age needs men who can rule their spirits. It needs 
disciplined leaders, fit for freedom. For these it must 



72 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

turn to the schools of leadership ; it must look to those 
who have subjected themselves to the discipline of life 
under ideal aims. 

Next, the educational ideal meets the problem of free- 
dom by its evaluation of a motive and an aijri so high 
that, while all strive toward it, all find scope for individual 
freedom in the process. There cannot be social unity so 
long as men set before them, as the surmnwm honum^ 
material good of any kind or any object which cannot 
be shared by all alike. We are not all equally free to 
be millionaires, nor equally free to be foreign ministers 
or national presidents. But the educational ideal holds 
that the least man is as free as the greatest, the poorest 
as the richest, to set before him as the chief aim in life 
the fullness and freedom of personality and of social 
realization. It calls on men to take their money making, 
their toil, their legislating and presiding as means toward 
life, the ultimate good. It is the voice that speaks to 
the barn-builder, " Thou fool, this night thyself is required 
of thee ! " When men live for personality they find har- 
mony in freedom. With this aim we discover that those 
very sacrifices due to social living which seemed to limit 
our freedom under selfish and material aims, make for 
the greater freedom and fullness of personality, that the 
constant struggle between the individual desire and the 
social welfare is the crucible in which the pure metal of 
manhood is refined. This is the meaning of the word, 
" He that will lose his life shall save it." The higher 
goal places right values on the lower aim. The educated 
man has learned to live for values that can only be found 
in the way of service, of investment of self in the good of 
all ; he has seen a goal that can only be reached as he shall 
help others toward it. In such a program of human 
action harmony, unity, and solidarity is consonant with 
true freedom. 

But this is only part of a more inclusive solution of 



PROBLEMS OF WORLD LIVING 73 

the problem. By its insistence on ultimate values edu- 
cation has enabled us to see that life's present values 
are to be realized only in the social whole. Reiterating 
the question, what is life worth? it finds satisfying worth 
only in the life of all. It has so stimulated lives to seek 
ideal ends that most of us have discovered the very simple 
fact that they cannot be found individually and can be 
ours only as they are possible to all. If the idealist could 
be an egoist he could not be an individualist practically ; 
he is forced to depend on all others for any realization 
of ideal ends. But this is not all. The fundamental 
thesis of education that man was made to grow implies 
a goal for growth. This it now sees in an ideal society. 

The other problem is essentially one peculiar to our 
American life, are we sufficient for the new world oppor- 
tunity? 

We are at the dawn of a new day ; its coming was 
indicated by a darkness that seemed to obscure the moral 
vision and a sleep that lay like a paralysis over all 
patriotism. We sneered at the ideals of yesterday ; the 
cynic's laugh drowned the songs of love of country or 
the sentiment of devotion to her good. We seemed to 
be content with the glory of gain, with the proud achieve- 
ments of kleptocratic princes. Then came the deluge, 
the world catastrophe of the war. With a tardiness that 
w^ll be our shame for many days we at last realized its 
moral significance. We entered the world. 

We have found our new worlds to conquer. They are 
not those of the old world nor of territorial extent any- 
where. They are in the realm of human values. We say 
that we entered the war to make the world safe for 
democracy. This is a new idea, fighting for a principle, 
fighting not for our form of government but for the rights 
of people to govern themselves. But are, we ourselves 
ready for democracy.'^ Are we willing to pay its high 
price .'^ It means so much more than that every one shall 



74 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

be permitted to participate in government; it means 
that every one shall take up the burden of sovereignty 
which is not less than high-minded devotion to the common 
good. The worth of a democracy is determined by the 
worth of the lives of its people. We are not ready to 
demonstrate democracy to the world until w^e set aside 
all our personal aims and desires in order to give to the 
whole world democracy the full service of a worthy life. 

ARE WE PREPARED? 

The new tasks are much more difficult than the old 
ones. We had completed one task, subduing the material 
difficulties, subjugating the material forces, and developing 
the physical resources of a great new domain. These 
days of schooling past, are we ready for world living? 
The grave question now is whether we have the spirit 
and power to take up and carry through the greater, 
higher a/nd more elusive task that awaits, to conquer 
ourselves, to apply ourselves to the impressive problem 
of a world society. We are called from developing a 
continent to develop the resources of humanity. This 
is the call of the new patriotism. 

The moral glory of American character in the past 
century was due not one whit more to puritan ideals than 
to the stimulus of a tremendous enterprise ; pioneering 
made men as truly as puritanism. We were saved by 
our shortcomings and our struggles. From Valley Forge 
to the Panama Canal is one eloquent chapter of splendid 
moral achievement under the curriculum of a nation's 
birth throes. The vision of a new land of freedom and 
a new humanity nerved our fathers. The vision has been 
largel}^ fulfilled and we are the most impoverished of 
all peoples if to-day w^e are ready to sigh that there is 
no more chance for heroism. The diflSculty is not to find 
chances but to find those who will measure up to them. 



PROBLEMS OF WORLD LIVING 76 

The real test of the people comes after the desert has 
been made to rejoice as the rose, then comes the trial of 
spiritual greatness. Solomon's glory was too much for 
Israel's moral fiber. How shall we face our new day, 
with its demands for costly sacrifices for the sake of 
aims and ideals that are less easy to apprehend than the 
rallying cries of " No taxation without representation " 
or " The union one and indivisible," with purposes less 
palpable than the clearing of forests and the crossing of 
the plains, purposes which call for finer heroism? Are 
we to die where others have died with the good indeed 
attained but so blindly cherished as to be fatal to the 
best.? 

And this is not all; we were thrown into the world 
life to share in the struggle for moral ideals. The war 
brought few of the old thrills of patriotism, for we were 
not fighting for the glory of a nation but for the rights 
of humanity. The war may be our purging; it will 
certainly be our testing. It called for pioneering in the 
realm of ideals. 

We confess that we were caught unprepared. Certainly 
we were destitute of fighting tools ; we slept too long in 
a fool's paradise of separation as though we could be 
separate from humanit}^ But one does not lessen appre- 
ciation of the colossal task of physical preparation in 
suggesting that America was not wholly without prepara- 
tion of an even more essential nature. Even before war 
was declared the college youth showed that they were 
intellectually prepared. Since then the streams of vol- 
unteers have come from the universities. They but fol- 
lowed the courses that idealism flowing from these centers 
had traced. The wide views gained in education had 
saved them from provincialism and had brought a world 
within their habits of thinking. The social spirit of the 
universities had taught them to think in terms of human 



76 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

sympathies. That preparation which education had given 
constitutes just the preparation which the making of a 
new world will demand. 

The problem of to-morrow is one of living in a con- 
gested world. It involves the discovery of those values 
which all can enjoy to their fullness without trespass one 
upon another. It is a problem of world-wide social justice 
under conditions of most intimate neighboring. We will 
have to solve in world living the very problems of con- 
flicting interests which have been ours at home. It is 
an extension of our intense social problem ; are we ready 
for it.? 

We have been living in the glut of material power 
and prosperity. Now we will have to adjust ourselves to 
new conditions. The prosperity of abundance is past. 
The appalling fact that the tremendous wealth of our 
day is accompanied by abject poverty is evidence that 
we had not learned how to live under conditions of material 
prosperity. We have been rudderless on the tide of 
riches while still clamoring for new tributaries. Once 
the problem was to get wealth out of the forests and 
the hills, now it is to apply that wealth without waste 
to the whole of our lives, to insure its highest and 
enduring values. As we have become masters of the 
untamed land it is ours also to become masters of its 
untamed crop of wealth. Our danger is that the rank 
growth of that crop shall choke us. 

There is little danger that we shall delude ourselves 
with the false hope that the new day will come in a 
beautiful roseate flush of universal benevolence born of 
affluence. A terrible object lesson has forced us to aban- 
don the program of salvation by material civilization. 
Left to the old motives and the old methods man easily 
relapses into madness we thought he had outgrown. The 
struggles of the weak and the iniquities of the strong 
are not of the past alone. They did not end when the 



PROBLEMS OF WORLD LIVING 77 

world war ended. That has only projected on a larger 
screen our social problem. Now the sword is laid away 
and the social warfare is fiercer and more cruel than ever. 
Our social problems are intensified with the return of 
peace. The competition in business will be keener ; the 
strain of readjustment will call for new modes of organ- 
ization between capital and labor, the worker will have 
tasted new power and greater freedom and the employer 
will be seeking to recover from heavy exactions. Shall 
we look for solutions only in conflict.'^ Shall we who 
have disowned war nationally rely on it industrially .^^ 
Shall we own up that this problem is too big for our 
brain .^ It is a tremendous issue, but the very intensity 
of the problem is the measure of our opportunity. 

CONTROLLING IDEALS 

Again our hope is in the educational ideal. Our hopes 
have specific bases. First, that with its insistence on 
personal values, education also insists that greatness is 
only by growth and that growth is not a matter of 
accretion but of development. It is the prophet of the 
gospel that there are riches all may enjoy without any 
one being the poorer, that there is property that all may 
possess in common and 3^et each one hold for his own. 
It is our hope because it holds out the one great religious 
message this age needs. We can look for nothing beyond 
conflict so long as the one aim of every man is to possess 
all he can of the world's limited stock of things. There 
will be harmony when the aim of life is not to possess 
but to enjoy, not to put things in our names but to use 
them for the enriching of all life. It is our hope as it 
leads to the new ultimate aim of a society in which all men 
unite their efforts for the increase of the common goods 
of love and joy, of truth and beauty. 

The educational ideal gives sanity and worth to our 
national program. It reminds our youth that, as a 



78 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

people, we are not great simply because we are big, nor 
because we have so much. Barns do not make the man 
nor banks the nation. Size is the last and least criterion 
in the scale of infinite values. Greatness lies in ideals, 
it is revealed in human standards. It is manifest in 
development. Life grows only as it comes into finer and 
more complex relations. A man is greater than a geologic 
mammoth because he is a more complex organism. The 
hope of to-morrow lies in the democratic-minded who 
will put old goods into new scales, who will teach us to 
spurn some of our highly cherished lumber, who will help 
us to see worth and wealth as yet unknown. We shall 
seek our growth as a people mtensivelyy not in holding 
more but in becoming more. Before we grasp new lands 
we will seek to make our own better, our cities places 
where the boys and girls shall play on the streets thereof, 
our schools homes of idealism. The increasing complexity 
of our modern life means for us the opportunity of devel- 
opment. But it demands more of us ; it requires wider 
and deeper preparation. The future with its greater 
social complexity calls on the educator's patience, the 
pupil's loyalty and the people's cheerful payment of the 
price of training the powers, disciplining the judgment and 
developing the will until we are ready for this new day. 

Our hope is in the educational ideal because it is an 
ideal; it is always richer with promise than with achieve- 
ment. It is prophetic. The educated man never shrinks 
from being called an idealist. He rejoices in the good 
and the glory of the past as an index of that which is 
to be. He scorns ease, for the good he has inherited 
constitutes his indebtedness to the good that may be. He 
is not ashamed of great emotions, of the hopes that stir 
men and the passions that compel them, for he has learned 
that all existing personal wealth has been created in the 
visions of enthusiasts ; the world has ever found its pot 
of gold because it followed the rainbow. The cynic's 



PROBLEMS OF WORLD LIVING 79 

contempt of life is not the sign of culture ; it is the evidence 
of intellectual atrophy. One measure of a man's educa- 
tion is his response to great stimuli. If the poet's appeal, 
the prophet's promise or warning, the patriot's ardor 
mean nothing to you, you have not seen the educational 
ideal, you are not educated. " Though I have all knowl- 
edge and understand all mysteries, and though I speak 
with the tongue of an angel and have not love — I am 
nothing." Life is desolate without ideals. The out- 
reaching after that which is not yet seen, the answer to 
that which cannot be demonstrated, this is the fruitage 
of education. This is the reason educated men meet emer- 
gencies, build bridges which make concrete their visions, 
dig canals which the nations have declared impossible and 
enter on social programs which earn at their beginning 
only the laughter of the practical. This is what might 
be called the function of fools, to follow the ideal. This 
is that which the world has ever called foolishness whether 
seen in Jesus at Calvary, Paul at Rome, Garibaldi in 
Italy, Livingston in Africa, or Lincoln in Illinois. These 
fools are the people who have seen the day before it is 
full morn, who believe that one setting of the sun does 
not mean the crack of doom, who in the night carry 
the light within, who fear not the future because they 
have faced the past and have found the eternal values 
that spring up, fresh with the dew of every new day. 
They live in the strength of timeless knowledge. They 
are ready for the new days because neither the rack of 
clouds at dawn nor the incoherent cries of those who awake 
from sleep can daunt them ; they have heard of other 
dawns and they serve the ends that last through all the 
days. 

Problems of industry and economic relations perplex 
us ; under organized greed men writhe until they rise in 
hot rebellion ; torn by passions and led as sheep by false 
and greedy shepherds mobs meet and battle with one 



80 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

another. " Is this democracy ? " we cry ; " Then give us 
a benevolent autocracy I " Yes, this is democracy, blind, 
untrained and in the dark. Yet these are better men 
who strive for their ideals, who fight for freedom — even 
though in strange ways — than are those who sit as 
stall-fed slaves. And the cure for their darkness is light, 
and for their bitterness true brotherhood and for all their 
divisions the healing of a common love and the recognition 
of common rights. These are the ways we all must learn. 
And these ways we must teach our children lest they fall 
heirs to a world sadder far than ours. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE SPIRITUAL NATURE OF EDUCATION IN A DEMOCRACY 

The spiritual, still regarded as a mysterious, separate 
something, appears unrelated to the problems of a democ- 
racy ; can we discover it as an integral quality in life? 

Modern emphasis on religious education has one serious 
danger, that we shall fall into the habit of thinking of it 
as entirely separated from general education, saying to 
ourselves. Here are these two, general education and 
religious education ; each has its own aim and its own 
institutions, workers and methods ; work in one has no 
necessary relation to work in the other. Commonly our 
mode of thought to-day permits us to think of these two 
quite independently. We assume that general education 
is that which a child receives in public school and college; 
religious education is that which the Sunday school 
attempts. The aim of the first is recognized by all ; its 
processes are generally indorsed; but about the other, 
religious education, there still remain much doubt and 
more indifference. This is not strange so long as religious 
education continues to mean instruction about religion, 
creating an annex to the child's educational edifice and 
furnishing it with the history and literature of religion. 
Given a good school system, why should children go to 
an additional institution to receive this appendix of 
knowledge? Those who think in this way naturally ask, 
is it really essential to one's life equipment to get this 
extra knowledge? 

The difficulty arises in part from our use of words ; we 
have been speaking of general education, musical educa- 
tion, business education, physical education and religious 

81 



82 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

education as though we could split education into so many 
fractions. There is no such a thing, for example, as 
musical education unless we mean that all the process of 
education is accomplished in a musical manner or by 
musical methods. Only two of these phrases or terms 
have a reasonable basis; general education is conceivable 
as signifying the entire educational process ; religious 
education is conceivable as signifying a special aim or 
value to be given to all education. If by religious educa- 
tion we mean the special processes of instruction in 
religious knowledge alone then we use the phrase in a 
misleading manner. Religious education does include this 
special instruction, but it also includes whatever has to 
do with the full development and the social realization 
of a person as a religious being. 

Education is religion in action. Only the short-sighted 
mind can speak of the separation of religion and edu- 
cation. They are not two separate things which we must 
somehow harmonize ; they are related as are thought and 
action, as are life and feeling. Religion is not some- 
thing to be added, if possible, to the present content of 
education ; it is its cause and motive. And education is 
not a process which religion can use for its ends, but 
education is religion finding a mode in lives. All true 
education is religious in the degree that it realizes the 
possibilities of persons growing into social fullness ; all 
religion is educational in that it moves lives out into the 
realization of social destiny. The organizations and 
mechanics of both may be separate, but the meanings, 
ideas and forces of both are inseparable. We cannot 
have adequate education apart from essentially religious 
concepts of persons and society, and it is hopeless to 
think of religion without the educational ideal of the 
development of lives and society. These are the truisms 
of which we must often assure ourselves lest we fall into 
the habit of partitioning and even setting up in conflict 



SPIRITUAL NATURE OF EDUCATION 83 

the great forces that make for human development. In 
this long labor that alone gives life worth and meaning, 
the labor to realize our social ideals, to have a world of 
love and righteousness, we must keep alive the full vision 
of all our allies, we must see home and school and church 
as the great forces of hope, the means by which the new 
day and the better world is to be. 

It is highly important that we shall not permit the 
building of a barrier across the field of education with 
the sacred on one side and the secular on the other. We 
must try to avoid the divorce that has come into the rest 
of our thinking as though one day were sacred and the 
other days secular, one place sacred and others not, one 
profession sacred and others devoid of religious signifi- 
cance. We are trying to redeem the non-sacred from 
the implications of entire separateness. We seek not alone 
one sacred day but the sacredness of every day as conse- 
crated to man's highest good. To-day we would think of 
all professions in the light of their high responsibilities, 
their sacred obligations to humanity. There is henceforth 
nothing common or profane to the man who has seen how 
even the least things affect that which is most sacred of 
all, human personality. The idea of separation into 
sacred and secular is really so modern that it has not 
obtained ineradicable rooting. Once practically all educa- 
tion was under the recognized sacred authorities. It still 
carries over some memory of that association. It is some- 
how different from other human interests. It must be re- 
stored to human reality at the same time as religion un- 
dergoes a like process. Then it ought not to be difficult 
to prevent the unfortunate cleavage in our thinking of 
these two. 

Naturally some one says. But we cannot mix the 
religious elements into general education in a country 
where religious freedom is consistently observed. That 
is to say, the public schools cannot teach religion. Very 



84i EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

true; but that is not at all what we are thinking about 
now ; that is a problem which will be considered in another 
place. We are pleading against the custom of parceling 
education out into distinct packages labeled " sacred " 
and " secular." Perhaps we can best see how illogical 
such a partition is by considering how the characteristics 
of sacred and secular are common to all true forms of 
education. 

General education mu^t he essentially religious. That 
which we call secular education is just as sacred as any 
other. The task of the teacher in a public school is, 
in the finest sense, as truly religious as the task of the 
church-school teacher. Of course we all know some week- 
day teachers who are more effective religiously than 
are some church-school teachers. But that is not the 
point ; the significant consideration goes much deeper : 
rightly conceived the aim of public education involves the 
most sacred concept that has ever come to the human 
mind ; it is nothing less than this, that the most important 
enterprise for society, as society, is the development and 
organization of persons. The public-school system is our 
social recognition of the sacredness of personality. It 
is democracy directing itself to the development of its 
sources in personality. 

It is true that public education is often a very poor 
affair. It is true that the system is often guilty of 
crimes against personality. It is true that few work 
with vision and the greater part of school life seems to 
be controlled by a blind following of traditions. But the 
ideal is there. One single fact stands out clear, that 
education is the largest social enterprise of our day. 
Another fact has always controlled, though it has not 
always been patent, that this our largest social enterprise 
is directed toward the good of the society of to-morrow. 
It seeks to direct the growth of the lives that make the 



SPIRITUAL NATURE OF EDUCATION 85 

citizenship of to-morrow. It is devoted to persons. It 
works in faith. 

General education is sacred because it deals with lives 
directly. This it is that gives sacredness to any pro- 
fession, the responsibility it has for persons. If religion 
is our ideal or concept of the meaning and value of life 
then whatever gives meaning or value to life is to that 
extent religious. The aim of state education is the enrich- 
ing of the life of the people. It is building itself through 
its developing members. It seeks finer people in a finer 
world. It is doing the work which we think of God as 
doing. The real meaning of every school, that is every 
one which is more than an information packing house, is 
that men might have life more abundantly. It works that 
the ideals of the race may be realized. 

Public education reveals the soul of democracy. Pub- 
lic education is our supreme demonstration of democ- 
racy. It takes more than universal suffrage to make a 
democratic people. It requires a popular aim, a popular 
purpose — that is an aim conceived by people for people 
— as the ultimate aim of all social life. It means a 
people united by the dominating aim that life shall grow 
from more to more. It means the determination of all 
the mechanisms of civil life by that dominant aim. A 
democratic state is that state which exists that its people 
may find fullness of life, that their social vision may be 
realized. Now this is the direct aim of the public school. 
H'ere democracy is immediately engaged in its supreme 
work. 

Somehow that high aim must be held clear above all 
the maze of details of school work. We must clearly avow 
the spiritual character growing out of the democratic 
purpose of education. Somehow a responsibility for per- 
sons must be laid on the institution that is shaping the 
habits, forming the ideals and setting the standards of 



86 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

living for our children. Our concern for democracy will 
help us to see always the spiritual significance of the social 
aggregation of all the children of a community day after 
day. It will help us to realize the larger processes that 
are going on in the school, those to which lessons and 
learning are incidental, the actual determination of the 
spirit of youth and their steady habituation in modes of 
social living. 

The school is the largest spiritual influence outside the 
family. Hour after hour for five days of the week all 
the children of a community are together learning what 
life means and what it is worth. How foolish it seems 
for the church, reaching only some of these children for 
only a few minutes every week, to stand on one side 
and to assume that its work alone is religious and all 
the rest, though very useful, is still, at best, non-religious. 
In the measure that any institution interprets life, gives 
meaning to life and trains in habits of living, trains as 
a society, it is religious. Since the public school to-day 
does this work consciously more fully than any other insti- 
tution certainly there is a very real and important sense 
in which it is engaged in religious work. Above all it is 
religious as by an experience in democracy it prepares for 
full life in democracy, that is, it is preparing for a social 
order determined by spiritual values. 

PUBLIC SCHOOL. AND RELIGION 

It scarcely seems necessary to face the common objec- 
tion that the school cannot be religious because it does 
not teach religion. That is to confound two different 
things, religion as a quality of life and an experience, on 
one side, and religion as a field of knowledge. In the lat- 
ter sense religion is not necessarily religious ; it is religious 
only in the degree that it imparts the religious quality 
to life, only as it gives meaning and value and direction 
to the whole of life. The school is religious, but it is not 



SPIRITUAL NATURE OF EDUCATION 87 

sectarian ; it is not ecclesiastical. We have been using 
the word " religious " as a descriptive adjective. Here 
it expresses a quality and a purpose, not a certain group 
of facts, not a peculiar field of knowledge and not certain 
special forms of activities. Religion never will be a 
dominating force in life until we take it out of its ecclesi- 
astical pigeonhole and open our eyes to see it as a quality 
and force and an ideal everywhere. 

The purpose of the school lies with a religious per- 
son. The schools are necessarily religious because they 
deal with persons who are essentially religious. They 
cannot take boys and girls and split off a section of their 
personalities which may be called the religious nature and 
bid them leave that outside the schoolhouse. They cannot 
do this because there is no sectional partition in human 
nature. It is the whole person who is religious just as it 
is the whole person who is being educated. 

In all thinking on the problems and plans of religious 
education few things are more important than this, to 
have always clearly in mind the fact that human nature 
is not a divisible thing; always and everywhere education 
is dealing with the same person and always in a very true 
sense it deals with the whole of the same person. The 
boy who goes to Sunday school may not look like the 
same boy who is yelling on the school playground; but 
he is the same, not only in name but in nature. He takes 
the same nature to both the schools. The Sunday school 
has for a long time assumed that when John came to 
its classes he brought only his spiritual powers, but that 
mistake was no more common and no more serious than 
the other assumption, that he takes only his mental 
powers to the public school. The Sunday school is 
recovering from the mistake of attempting to teach souls 
without minds ; but the public school must turn from the 
error of trying to teach minds without souls. 

Whatever any influence of life does with a boy or a 



88 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

girl it does with them as persons, not as minds, memories 
or spirits. Whatever change the school effects is a change 
in a life, in the totality of a personality. To change 
any one's mind is to change him, is to change his life. 
This is now recognized in modem Sunday schools ; but 
it must be recognized as precisely what is taking place in 
any school. 

As soon as we escape from the traditional concepts of 
human beings as divided into separate departments or 
faculties and grasp their essential unity we find it impos- 
sible to think of the public schools as entirely separated 
from the religious lives of the pupils. They cannot be 
separated from any part of their lives. 

It is impossible to have an educational effect and avoid 
a religious result. The important thing is to realize that 
whatever affects a person must affect him as a religious 
being, that whatever really affects his character must 
really have some religious quality in it. Whatever the 
attitude of the school may be on " religious questions " 
it cannot avoid contact with religious persons and it can- 
not avoid affecting those persons as to the value and 
meaning of life for them. 

One danger lies here, however, that teachers shall 
become unduly conscious of the religious nature of their 
tasks, shall feel that they must alw^ays be thinking of the 
effect of their work on religious natures. The better 
course is for one simply to do the work that has to be 
done, giving each life every possible stimulus and means 
of nurture without attempting an analysis of the parts 
or phases of grow^th. Again we have to insist on the 
unity of the person who is being educated. Only harm 
can come from attempts to disintegrate the total process 
of growth in order to determine how a soul is getting on. 
The fact of religious responsibility is not an occasion 
for morbid anxiety but rather one for rejoicing; it must 
be seen as the ground for greater dignity in the teaching 



SPIRITUAL NATURE OF EDUCATION 89 

profession; it must give the teacher the joy of sharing in 
a great and holy work. 

CHURCHES AND SCHOOLS 

After all what does this religious responsibility and 
privilege mean but that public education deals with lives? 
The schools teach the fine art of living. That is their 
business. This is their immediate, practical contact with 
all religious activities. Religion is the motivation of 
life ; it is such a vision of the meaning and value of life 
as transforms and compels the life. The church and the 
school have the same task : to lead people into fullness 
of living. The difference lies principally in two facts, 
First, that the church being an entirely free, voluntary 
body can select and use its own materials and fields of 
training. Second, churches work with selected groups 
while the school accepts the entire community. Each 
church uses the special teachings of its own group. But 
the schools being the common agencies of all the people, 
are limited to those forms and activities about which there 
is general public agreement. This gives the church a 
much wider range of interests as to subjects. The social 
limitations of the schools have the practical effect of 
preventing the current concepts of religion and its special 
interpretations from coming into use there. But they 
do not prevent the greatest of all concepts, the glowing 
ideals of life and its worth and possibilities. On the 
other hand churches are limited by their group aspects 
which often tend to give children caste training. 

If we were to ask the schools what product they have 
for society they would answer " Citizens." They seek 
to give back these boys and girls trained to live the 
social life of their day. If we ask the church as to its 
product do we not look for the same answer, " Men and 
women who do the will of God here "? The training in 
the life of present-day society is, at least, an essential 



90 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

part of training to live in the democracy of God. A 
sense of the unity of such work must be encouraged. The 
church must recognize every teacher of lives as a spiritual 
agent and servant. If it docs not do so it loses the aid 
of its best allies. More, if it does not do so it gives 
evidence that it does not know its own task. No one 
can seriously seek the development of lives and the organ- 
ization of an ideal society without discovering and recog- 
nizing every agency that develops lives. Whoever touches 
a life to make it more or less, to give it new riches and 
strength, to teach it the supreme art of living, works with 
the great Life of which we are a part. 

Public education is sustained hy spiritual ideals. Es- 
sentially the best ideals of public education are religious 
ideals ; they look to the realization of the noblest hopes 
the human race has ever cherished. They hold before us 
the glowing vision of a new earth that is a new heaven. 
Every true teacher is an idealist in the simple, everyday 
sense. They have in their hearts the evidence of things 
not yet seen. Their faith carries them forw^ard. Nothing 
could be more dreary than the daily routine of telling old 
facts to unwilling pupils ; nothing could be more like a 
tread-mill existence than the dreary round through a 
curnculum that is no more than a highway paved with 
information. Merely to drill unwilling slaves in intel- 
lectual exercises is to become a slave where one might be 
a priest. Professional pride is the sense of the worth 
of service in the light of its high aim. Teachers believe 
that education is the means by which the world is coming 
to self-realization. They see democracy coming into its 
own. They look beyond school mechanics to their splen- 
did end in a finer, nobler society. If they teach for wages 
they are poor economists ; the same energies would give 
larger rewards anywhere else. They are not prone to 
boast of the fact, but they labor not for salaries but for 
society. 



SPIRITUAL NATURE OF EDUCATION 91 

Just as the church is sustained by that vision of a 
world in which men live in love and do justice and find 
and follow the truth, so is our system of public schools 
maintained and conducted in the high hopes that men can 
learn to live and to so live that the outstanding ills of 
this day may be no more and a society that fulfills our 
hopes can come to be. Surely this is working for what 
the church calls the will of God. And that consciousness 
is peculiarly keen in the school of our day. 

The social theory in education is a furtJier indication 
of religious purpose. This is the period of the social 
emphasis in education. That means not alone that we 
recognize that all education is a social process, but it 
means, too, that we see that these social processes must 
have social results. Education not only uses social 
experience but, because it is social experience, it makes 
society. Evidently we have hardly caught sight of the 
tremendous religious implications of modern education. 
Besides the considerations advanced we might mention 
the religious nature of the school processes ; here we have 
three great social facts cooperating: first, an ideal social 
group affording children a tremendously potent social 
experience ; second, a social theory dominating the methods 
gf modern education, and, third, a social aim gradually 
emerging as the reason for and the ultimate aim of the 
work of the school. Along with this comes the fact of 
the social emphasis and interpretation of present-day 
religion. It has discovered the world in which it works 
and it sees it as the object of its work. It is satisfied no 
longer with plucking selected individuals from an earth 
of woe into a heaven of selfish felicity ; it seeks to bring 
about a society which is the very family of God. In this 
it works immediately with the schools, no longer conceived 
as packing houses of information but seen as social insti- 
tutions organizing social experience that the new society 
may be realized. That is the faith of teachers to-day. 



92 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

Whatever else is true, the true teacher must be a 
religious person for to be an educator implies that one 
has faith in life as growth and this is to make a spiritual 
interpretation of the universe. The teacher is one to 
whom life means for every one just the chance to become 
and to become fully in the life of all. The concept that 
lives may grow and that all life may increase, develop, 
find harmony and fulfill its hopes underlies all educational 
effort. But the teacher is one who, as it were, says to 
the world, I believe so much in life as growth that I 
give myself wholly to this as my first purpose, and not 
to my own growth alone but to aiding the growth of all. 
Each man's work is really his creed in action. Your 
religion is what you do for the world. To give greater 
meaning and worth to life is surely the most religious 
service any one could render. The world is really 
religious in the measure that life, the life of all, becomes 
rich and full. It is not talking about religion that gives 
life its divine quality, it is finding that quality and worth 
of life that makes the world religious. Many a school 
has done more to make a community religious than all 
its churches, for often they have given it nothing but 
analyses of religion while it has led the people into more 
life ; it has opened for them the world of the spirit ; it 
has lifted their eyes from things to the eternal facts ; it 
has helped them to love one another and to live together 
kindly, cooperatively ; it has enriched for all the life of 
things and made it but the means of the life that is more 
than things. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE SCHOOL OF DEMOCRACY 

Society has a social purpose; its highest duty is the 
development of a more perfect society. The degree to 
which this primary duty is recognized becomes the measure 
of the democratic tendencies of any society, and our imme- 
diate community groups are the societies in which this 
ideal must be demonstrated. 

Democracy is realized in the degree that society adopts 
the program of the development of persons. There are 
many evidences of social consciousness of such a purpose.^ 
There are signs of recognition of its educational char- 
acter. There are those who see its spiritual significance. 
The college sophomore is not the only one who asks, What 
do we live for? Older men come back with deep serious- 
ness to that question. It appears in an enlarged form : 
What do we all live for? When one is conscious of society 
there must surely be some questionings as to its purpose. 
And are we not under intimations of meaning as to our 
world life? We hope for a finer order of life, growing 
put of this present, one in which the inner life really 
shall be supreme. But whether we thus cherish high 
vision or hope only for proximate improvements it is quite 
clear that life ought to have a plan, and life's organiza- 
tion, in society, ought not to spend itself without purpose. 
If one looks at a village or a city, with its manifold com- 
plex activities, there ought to be an answer to the question, 
To what end all this endeavor? 

1 As in the development of the social sciences, in attention to 
eugenics, in courses of popular study on social welfare, in the 
quickened conscience of churches on social needs and in the tendency 
to predicate social programs on human needs. 

93 



94 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

Granted the social aim of society, what is the program 
for its attainment? Here we have to plead guilty to 
the pathetic indictment so vigorously presented by 
Wallace ^ and acknowledge that, while we have applied 
science to practically every other phase of life we have 
developed no technique and no scientific theory of the 
development of the personal qualities and phases of life. 
Boasting of progress in a thousand other fields, of what 
worth is it to us if we, the masters and users of these 
processes, ourselves show no improvement? In what ways 
are our modern methods more efficient in the development 
of character than were those of Egypt, or in the Athens 
of Socrates or the Rome of Cicero? True we have multi- 
plied schools and democratized the processes of instruc- 
tion ; we have systems of schools ; but it would be impos- 
sible to show that their courses are determined by the 
needs of society, by any program for the development 
of society. The difficulty lies in the fact that we have 
no consciousness of a real social program. The large 
game of living society does not play in any completeness ; 
it rather develops sporadic plays, parts of the game. We 
discuss democracy as though it were one of a number of 
efficiencies which society would do well to acquire, failing 
to see it as the essential program of society, as the real 
business of developing the lives of all. 

Perhaps the situation is not as bad as at first appears. 
The very nature of society establishes certain educational 
efficiencies. The function of social education is not im- 
posed on society ; it is inherent in its nature. Society 
cannot stop educating itself because it cannot cease associ- 
ating itself. It cannot cease to be a school of social 
living so long as it affords an experience of social living. 
As the social order becomes more complex it becomes a 
school for higher living. Even our present competitive 

1 " Social Environment and Moral Progress," Alfred Russell Wal- 
lace (Cassell, 1913). 



THE SCHOOL OF DEMOCRACY 95 

order, rent and torn by failure and disaster, plowed by 
discontent and watered with ideals, becomes the soil in 
which a new democracy grows. 

Social experience is the most effective school. In liv- 
ing with people democracy is learned. We cannot say, 
Lo here ! or, Lo there is the school of democracy ! It 
is everywhere. It is wherever lives are gaining vision, 
forming motives and ideals, establishing habits and devel- 
oping methods of living. It is in every family, every 
school, every village and city way, every social gathering, 
every college and factory and store, for good or ill. Of 
course this is one of those very simple facts, a truism, 
as commonplace as to speak of the earth's perpetual 
motion. But a truism is that which is so true it is always 
likely to be overlooked. We know that education is 
continuous, going on everywhere; but we do not act upon 
the fact; we do not plan our streets nor control them in 
the belief that character is being determined more in them 
than in the school-seats. We acknowledge the fact of 
continuous education but we limit our attempts at direc- 
tion to schools. We speak of systems of education and 
delude ourselves in watching the intricacy of operations 
in their little sphere. But the whole of education cannot 
be s^^stematized, though it must be realized ; it must be 
viewed with a comprehension of its forces and their 
effects. 

Educational potencies must he recognized and under- 
stood if they are to be wisely used. The first step to 
be taken in the preparation of the new democracy is to 
understand the constantly operative forces which are 
determining its character. That will compel a consider- 
ation of all that happens, especially in the lives of the 
young, in the light of its educational effects. Forgetting 
our traditional formalisms of education, with beginnings 
and endings, we will think of the cradle, home life, the 
long, sweet and happy play of childhood, the growing so- 



96 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

ciety that extends down the streets, takes in the school and 
widens out into the whole world as the child's and man's 
never recessing school. All the environment of growing 
lives will be seen in the light of effects, under the questions. 
In what ways does this help to make the child a true and 
fit member of society? In what ways does this qualify 
him for democracy? New scales of values will be applied 
to the physical conditions of family life, new measures to 
community conditions, streets, amusements, newspapers, 
books and occupations. Instead of asking what do men 
make out of them, we shall ask, what men are made by 
them? Nor must we impatiently say, these are, again, 
but truisms, for we do not habitually think or act in 
this manner regarding the real factors, the everyday 
experience, that makes men and women. 

VARIED ACTIVITIES IN EDUCATION 

But does not this general concept of all life as a process 
of education leave us in vague confusion of mind because 
of the interweaving of the many agencies, and in a state 
of helplessness because of their lack of definite educational 
characteristics? There need be no more serious diflS- 
culties here than are found in any real system of educa- 
tion, for all this variety and intricacy, found in the 
common experience of living, is essential to the develop- 
ment, the education of such a complex as man. Even 
in the school there must be approximately similar variety 
or the school fails to educate. The variety and infor- 
mality of everyday experience increases its educational 
potency. As to any attempt to organize it, that is not 
the principal need, rather we need to organize our own 
thinking about all that is happening around us and to 
give it a guiding spirit of life. Schematic control can 
only wisely develop as it follows a recognition of functions 
which has come out of long and patient study. 

Social agencies serve as educators each according to 



THE SCHOOL OF DEMOCRACY 97 

its own function. Perhaps the lines between the different 
forms of experience in Hfe are less vague than we are 
accustomed to think. If we analyze social experience 
into the family, the play-group, the school, the com- 
munity and industry or occupation we have fairly distinct 
lines emerging which each form of experience deals with 
as a distinct phase in one's education, and, in the order 
stated, there is indicated the steps of development. Each 
one is a circle of experience containing the preceding 
experience and reaching out to the next and larger one. 
Each form of social experience has in it the elements 
preparing one for life in the larger form. Each has a 
definite part to play in education for democracy. 

The need of an educational standard. If education 
is going on everywhere and all the time, why worry.'' 
Why not simply seek to improve life in general and let 
education take care of itself.? The answer is that this 
is precisely the proper procedure provided we know just 
what life in general ought to be, and in order to know 
this we have to determine standards of life, standards 
of growth of persons. We cannot tell how society ought 
to be ordered until we think it out in educational terms. 
We do not know what is wrong with our times until we 
examine them in the light of their effects on lives, until 
we test them b}^ the educational gauge. How do we know 
that a six-day week and an eight-hour day are best.'' 
Not by our own desires for rest, nor by any traditional 
imperative. We know only in the light of what is best 
for man's all-round development. We test all conditions 
of life by whether they are favorable or otherwise to 
the growth and happiness of man as a social being. And 
constantly new factors come into our tests ; even the 
slave-holder tested conditions by their physical effects on 
the efficiency of his slaves ; we have to move beyond that 
and test our cities, our streets, factories and homes by 
what they do for man as a free spirit. 



98 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

So that an educational standard gives a clue to the 
worth, the value and righteousness of life's conditions. 
It suggests a social order determined wholly by a con- 
trolling purpose to cause all conditions to stimulate the 
growth of persons, the realization of their powers, not 
alone of action, but of thought and feeling, of aspiration 
and ideal. That would be a democracy of the spirit, for 
that purpose would rise out of the common will and be 
devoted to the common well-being. That cannot come 
until we all learn steadily to think through the life of 
our everyday experience, of family and school and com- 
munity and see them as they determine the lives of people,^ 
the breadth and depth and wealth of their lives. 

So far we have an educational consciousness only as to 
the schools and the colleges and universities ; what would 
be the effect if we were to accustom ourselves to thinking 
in educational terms of the family, and of the community 
life? What further changes would take place should we 
emphasize, under education, the training and development 
of the spiritual nature? Should we be able to develop 
a program of education which would include equally all 
phases of human development, which would prepare 
properly for competent and complete social living because 
it called on every one of the agencies of life to play its 
full part? Such a program would not depend on formal 
schools alone ; it would coordinate the powers of every 
agency and of every institution into a program for all 
lives. 

A real program of education for democracy — and this 
is the same as speaking of a real program of full educa- 
tion — would determine the part played by each agency 
or institution in its social function ; it would determine 

1 See studies on " The Functions of Community Agencies " in 
Religious Education for Feb., 1918 (Vol XIII, 1) in which thirteen 
agencies are considered; also on "Libraries," April, 1918 (Vol. 
XIII, 2). 



THE SCHOOL OF DEMOCRACY 99 

the character of the relations of the growing life to 
each institution by two things, the need of that life and 
the purpose of democracy. 

THE FUNCTION OF THE FAMILY 

Any program which includs all the powers of lives 
for all the purposes of society mill give the place of 
first importance to the family. Its function is that of 
bringing lives into the world and nurturing them in a 
small social group. It has a more distinctly personal 
function than any other institution, First, because it deals 
with the young on every side of their lives, it has no 
reserves or limitations during early years ; it has free- 
dom of access to the feeling, judgment and will in a 
constant and most effective manner. Second, it accom- 
plishes its educational ends by personal means ; it educates 
by influences, and personal contacts, in a word by being 
a society ; and. Third, its purpose is avowedly more 
personal than any other agency. It is known by the 
kind of persons it produces. It is proud when its mem- 
bers secure the wealths of personality. Fourth, it reaches 
lives in the years when the greatest part of the educational 
process is being perfected. If the child learns more in 
the first five years than in all the rest of his life then 
the home must be the greatest of all schools. 

It may seem difficult to state the precise task of an 
institution which appears to have all tasks for its own 
at least for the first years of childhood. But two clarify- 
ing facts are to be noted: First, that society is tending 
to take the sole responsibility for several phases of early 
training away from the individual family and place it 
on the social group, and Second, there are certain well- 
defined areas of responsibility, indicated by the nature 
and function of the family, which society is assigning to 
it most distinctly. 

Society does tend to relieve the family of some immediate 



100 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

responsibilities by itself caring for the health of infants 
and the young. The family has ceased to be its own 
physician just as it has ceased to be its own weaver and 
tailor. But there is no tendency to establish social 
machinery which will take the place of parents in the 
care of the child's early mind and will. In fact one of 
the reasons for organizing social aid to the family in 
its physical task is that it may be stronger and have 
greater freedom for its spiritual duty. One thing society 
certainly has a right to expect of every family and that 
is that its first concern shall be for the characters of 
the children. Parents are under social obligation to 
organize the home for the education of the spirit, for 
training young lives in the motives and habits of social 
living. 

There has been a tendency to evade the responsibility 
of the family for the early development of social good- 
will and social ideals. Parents, recognizing their own 
failures, have demanded that the schools rectify their 
errors and make up their deficiencies. But that is im- 
possible. A child is not clay to be given to-day a twist 
this way and to-morrow to have the twist taken out of 
him. The schools begin too late; character is not fixed, 
but it is well formed by the time children go to school. 
Whatever value moral training may have in the schools 
it cannot have the values of beginnings. To attempt to 
build national character on school training is to try to 
build by beginning at the third floor with neither plans 
nor agencies for the lower ones. 

In any program of education for democracy there must 
be such a recognition of the fundamental work which the 
family has to do with character in its beginnings that 
we shall not only expect certain things of the family but 
we shall provide the family with the means of accomplish- 
ing its work and protect it in the prosecution of that 
work. We shall not hold him guiltless who interferes in 



THE SCHOOL OF DEMOCRACY 101 

any way with the freedom and powers of the parents to 
live with their children and to know them, to guide their 
minds and train their lives. We shall not look with com- 
placency on a system that provides us cheap goods or 
the manufacturer large profits by labor that makes 
physical parenthood a mockery and spiritual parenthood 
an impossibility. Nor shall we regard with complacency 
the family that deserts its opportunities and drives chil- 
dren either on the streets or into the care of those not 
trained for spiritual education while parents use its life 
as an instrument of their pleasures. In both cases we 
shall realize that the crime is committed against us all, 
that in such cases the family is simply passing its prob- 
lems on to the future and society is permitting the devel- 
opment of social misfits, aliens and despoilers. 

Any true program of education of all the people for 
the life of all the people will have a definite, socially 
recognized and adequately supported place for the family 
as an educational agency. That task will be just as 
clearly seen as the task of the schools. Society will count 
on the family with exactness for the spiritual nurture, the 
social development of the very young. And it will also 
count on the family for the continuation of its peculiar 
processes of intimate personal contacts, of the life of the 
small social group, through the years of youth. It will 
be the school in which young people learn first of all and 
most steadily of all, through immediate experience, the 
arts of social living and the motives of democratic living. 

THE FUNCTION OF THE CHURCH 

The church will range beside the family in the pro- 
gram of education. It is really a larger family, the 
membership of which is determined voluntarily. It is 
a social group brought together by spiritual ideals and 
organized to accomplish spiritual purposes. Its function 
is that of realizing an ideal spiritual society, a democracy 



log EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

of the spirit. It accomplishes its purpose by bringing 
persons together in a common program which seeks the 
development of the likeness of God, the realization of 
a spiritual ideal in men and the development of the 
society of God in the world. It is an educational agency 
because it deals with persons for the purpose of devel- 
oping their lives and with society for the purpose of 
developing its life. 

Its place in the social program is very definite ; it is 
the means by which, in a democracy, we afford persons 
freedom to form their own groups for religious purposes. 
It is the means by which, under civic freedom, it is 
possible for society to gather up the many forms of spir- 
itual stimuli which religion affords and to apply them to 
the whole of social life. It is the socialization of the 
traditions and the race heritage of religion under social 
freedom. The measure of its efficiency is the degree to 
which the stimuli of religion carry over into social life, the 
degree to which the faiths of the churches and their social 
life make better and more efficient members of society and 
a better, more spiritual society. 

The church then is that social agency which has freedom 
under democracy to use those powers which the state 
cannot use through its agencies ; it exists, specifically, to 
make religion count for life and society. It is to be 
held responsible in a democracy for the use of this power. 
Democracy commits to the churches and their agencies 
that part of the program which has to do with the explicit 
teaching of religion and with the direct training of 
religious life. It has a place in the program that is 
taken by no other. It has a place which is absolutely 
essential to any complete society. Therefore a democ- 
racy, as a political organization, will recognize the func- 
tion of the churches, will protect them in their proper 
spheres and, so far as it can do so in justice to all, it 
will encourage their work. This it will do because the 



THE SCHOOL OF DEMOCRACY 103 

churches are the special agencies for the spiritual life 
and this life is the fundamental basis of the power of 
a democracy. The church then has the function of spir- 
itual education under conditions which afford entire free- 
dom in the use of religious ideals and teachings. In its 
various forms it is democracy finding free association 
about many types of spiritual ideals. 

THE FUNCTION OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS 

The public schools have a highly/ important part in 
the program of education for democracy. They, again, 
are manifestations of democracy at work. Their pur- 
pose is to organize the powers of communities and of 
states and to direct the cooperation of professional 
workers so that the young may be properly trained in 
the life of democracy. This function we must keep clearly 
in mind, abandoning our inadequate concepts of the 
school as existing to equip our children with certain 
useful tools of knowledge ; it exists because democracy 
wills its existence in order that these on-coming members 
of the democracy may know its life, its ways, its ideals 
and may be quickened to carry forward its purposes. 

The schools as social agencies must be judged by social 
products. In thinking through the life of any community 
we have a right to look to the schools to accomplish cer- 
tain results with the wills, minds and social purposes and 
habits of the young. This is the basis on which all the 
varied activities of the school must be determined. Con- 
sidering the institution functionally we can no longer 
determine the range of its work by text-books and 
curricula, but by its responsibilities in social character. 
Such considerations justify playgrounds equally with 
libraries and laboratories; they justify social enterprises 
and recreations equally with recitations; they justify 
social usefulness equally with study programs. The 
school has its part to play by doing all that can be done 



104 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

under {ortns of social organization and experience to 
guide the young into the life of democracy. 

The functions of the schools in a democracy are based 
on their nature as institutions rising out of the will of 
the people. A school stands in a community, speaking 
through its brick and stone, and through all its work, in 
the words of state documents in the United States " We, 
the people of ... do will and hereby do carry out our 
purpose " to secure to to-morrow an intelligent, trained 
democracy. But if " we the people " do this a serious 
responsibility lies upon us all. We must know what it 
is we plan to do and we must know how it is done. Pop- 
ular education means popular responsibility for educa- 
tion. The recognition of the function of the school in 
the community carries with it the duty of all citizens 
to understand, through careful, painstaking study and 
intelligent, patient observation, this process of education 
for which they are responsible. 

COMMUNITY AGENCIES 

Communities organize many special agencies to assume 
specific functions: the public library, the park and recre- 
ation boards, special institutes and associations to care 
for special groups and numerous clubs and societies to 
accomplish particular ends. There is always the danger 
that organizations and institutions shall multiply, each 
arising in response to some definite and real need, until 
their lines of service cross continuously, until forms of 
service are duplicated, energies are wasted and com- 
petition becomes the order of the day. A social cross- 
section of some communities looks much like an ant-hill 
that has been over-turned, revealing bewildering activity 
without compensating results^ The condition is so 
familiar that it is not necessary to attempt to describe it. 

The problem of comirvwnity organization is altogether 
too large for satisfactory study here but there is one 



THE SCHOOL OF DEMOCRACY 105 

aspect which may be considered properly ; it is one which 
is fundamental. At present our current studies in com- 
munity organization seem to emphasize the desirability of 
adjusting the various activities into a coordinated pro- 
gram. This is desirable, but it surely must be predicated 
on deeper considerations than harmonious adjustments. 
The most perfectly adapted mechanism would be of little 
value unless it was designed and used to accomplish some- 
thing. The fundamental consideration, upon which all 
community organization must proceed, is that of the pur- 
pose of the community. Adjustment follows common con- 
viction of purpose. Purpose determines programs. The 
community is a mechanism ; it has a purpose which lies 
beyond itself. It exists to shelter, nurture and train 
persons ; it has the purposes of democracy ; it is the 
larger association of persons for social ends. And it is 
much more than a mechanism ; it is an organism ; its 
life is the life of persons in a society ; so that all programs 
must take into consideration its vital powers. 

The first step in community organization is the realiza- 
tion of the tremendous power of this social mechanism 
to produce social results, its influence over persons, its 
constantly exerted power to determine what they think 
and feel and what they are. It is making persons, not 
alone by its intentional educational work but because 
these persons respond to its life ; they see its ideals 
realized in actualities ; they answer to the community's 
impress on their lives. The community is seen as a real 
school w^hen its effects on character are understood. 

The basis of all community organization ought to be 
in the power of the community to determine the character 
of lives. It should express the purpose of the community 
to determine lives. Much as we may boast of the wealth 
and the industries of our villages and cities they have a 
potency far greater than all their factories ; it is the 
potency over the lives of persons, They have a purpose 



106 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

far higher than financial standing or statistical glory, it 
is that they may produce the best kind of persons. This 
power and this purpose will furnish the test for every 
community agency. Your community, seen as a school, 
will accept or reject activities as they make for or against 
life. It will make that test final and absolute. No matter 
what other inducements this or that industry or amuse- 
ment may offer, it has no right in community life if it 
does not minister to its program as a school of living. 
In like manner, this power and this purpose will determine 
the relationship of the various activities. It will furnish 
the point of their cooperation. The school will co- 
operate with the family not to lessen family duties but 
for the sake of richer, stronger lives. The school will 
cooperate with the churches, not to save the churches their 
intellectual labor, but to help them in growing finer 
manhood and womanhood. There will be cooperation 
between school and factory, not that the factory may 
have more intelligent human machines, but that all life 
may be enriched and especially the life of the worker and 
the community. 

The basis of commumty organization lies in the concept 
of the whole commwnity as a school of democracy. And 
the basis of community endeavor of every kind lies here.^ 
This is the test to which we may bring all our projects 
for community betterment. It is likewise the test to 
which we may bring all our plans for social amelioration ; 
do they contribute to the greater efficiency of the social 
order in developing itself, in developing stronger, happier 
men and women? 

1 This is not in conflict with the plans developed by B. S. 
Winchester (" Religious Education and Democracy," Pilgrim Press, 
1917) and W. S. Athearn, (" Religious Education and American 
Democracy," Abingdon Press, 1917). Both these authors describe 
methods by which the work of general education may be supple- 
mented, and complemented, by community cooperation in religious 
instruction. They present in detail one feature in the program of 
a conununity. 



THE SCHOOL OF DEMOCRACY 107 

Education for democracy, then, is not a special exer- 
cise, set into some apportioned periods of time, as the 
school and college days, the hours of church and church 
school. It is that which is going on all the time in our 
families, in all the life of the community. Whether we 
will to have it so or not the total social life is a school 
and is determining, by its teaching power, the kind of 
society we will have to-morrow. We cannot escape this ; 
we cannot offset this power of life to educate by any 
special provisions we may make. It is always there and 
inevitable. Surely then it is the part of wisdom to direct 
this power. If life is always educating; if it is such a 
school as we have suggested, should we not begin to regard 
it as a school, to determine its character and its effects .^^ 
Is it not high time to look out beyond the public schools 
and the church schools into the real schools, to consider, 
with care, how democracy is being determined on the 
streets, in the vacant lots, in the movies and the play- 
grounds, in the fruit-and-soda stores, wherever lives are 
together? Is it not simple common sense, if we organize 
the regular schools with a view to their purpose, to 
organize and direct this larger and constant school of 
life also with a view to its purpose to develop a finer 
democracy.?* 



CHAPTER IX 

BEGINNING AT HOME 

The family is the first and the most effective school of 
democracy. 

Democracy as an experience is an educational process. 
It is, for every citizen, a schooling in social control. It 
involves the participation of all persons in self-govern- 
ment, not alone because all naturally desire to have a 
voice in their own affairs, but because only through such 
participation can they learn the social life, only through 
the experience of governing can they become fit to govern. 
Democracy rests, as a method, not so much on the rights 
of persons as on their social and educational needs. As 
the actual experience of living is the real schooling for 
life so this laboratory of civic living is essential to citizen- 
ship. Exercise through social experience is essential to 
the development of man's social powers ; he learns the 
life of society through sharing all its experiences including 
the experience of self -direction.^ 

Democracy^ as an experience, must begin early in life. 
If it is true that persons learn the life of democracy only 
through the democratic experience of social self-direction 
then it is evident that this experience must come as 
early as possible in life. The exercise of the suffrage 
may be deferred until maturity, but the experience of 
democracy must be realized as soon as any experience 

1 The discussion of woman suffrage would have been settled long 
ago had it moved from the plane of personal rights to that of 
social needs. Since all in a democracy need the full experience of 
democracy it follows that women need, for the sake of the democ- 
racy, a full share in its life. The state cannot afford to have part 
of its life cut off from its own educational experience. 

108 



BEGINNING AT HOME 109 

can be known. The importance of early beginnings will 
be clear when we remember that democracy is not a matter 
of intellectual concepts or of political opinions ; it is a 
form of life, a way of social living. It is a continuous 
social life. Its habits cannot be too early acquired. 
Democratic citizens are not created by suffrage legisla- 
tion ; they grow through social training. If it is true 
that the foundations of society are laid in childhood then 
here we must begin to build our democratic society. 

Democracy begins at home. The family is the child's 
first educational group; no other has equal power. An 
autocratic family makes a poor school for democratic 
society. Yet nearly all families are either autocracies 
or dual monarchies. We still hold to the theory of the 
divine right of paternal kings to absolute rule. True, 
in American homes, the rule is largely a fiction. As a 
working man said recently : " We people of to-day catch 
it both ways ; when we were young we were compelled to 
respect our parents ; now we are grown we are compelled 
to respect our children." The seeming conflict and 
breakdown of the old authority in American homes is due, 
in part, to our attempt to maintain autocracy there 
while indorsing democracy outside. But the strife of 
wills, the asserted and ignored authority of parents, works 
only to develop individualists. The young often experi- 
ence a society in which they either live in subjection or in 
perpetual conflict of w^ills, devoid of all attempts to work 
out a common goodwill. They look out and forward to 
another and difl'erent society in which they will play their 
full and free parts. There is no relationship in experi- 
ence between the child's first social group of the family 
and his larger group of the state. 

To many it will seem a revolutionary doctrine to in- 
sist that the family must be organized as a democratic 
society. So men once thought about the state. But the 
moderp free st^te is founded, not pn some jti^iwly .discov- 



110 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

ered theory of government, but on the very nature of 
man, on his inalienable rights and his social needs. So 
with the family. Its very nature calls for a democratic 
form of life. The state is democratic because civic forms 
exist for the sake of social ends, for persons. The fam- 
ily must be democratic because it exists, even more simply 
and evidently, for the sake of persons ; it is the one social 
group which has this sole and dominating reason for exist- 
ence. It is a little society organized in order that per- 
sons may be bom into the world under conditions favor- 
able to their nurture and that they may develop as per- 
sons. Its raison d'etre lies in social persons. It is or- 
ganized for people. Its mechanisms for feeding and shel- 
ter are subsidiary and only contributory to its larger 
purposes ; they could be conducted much more efficiently 
in larger groups. The apparently wasteful methods of 
the small household are justified in the light of the social- 
educational advantages of the small group for the young. 
Here in this small group, so closely related, so mutually 
dependent, the art of life is learned. Social considera- 
tions dominate all its methods. Because it exists for 
the growth of lives the weakest and youngest have the 
largest claim on it. Those who are strong here serve the 
weak. The baby is the center of the home because de- 
mocracy always sets the child in the midst. 

But the practical question remains, how can the home 
life be so organized that children find in it a real expe- 
rience in democracy .f^ How can the family provide train- 
ing in self-government and social direction .^^ Many ask. 
Does not the practice of democracy involve the abandon- 
ment of parental authority and, therefore, of parental 
responsibility? No; on the contrary it increases both; 
it increases responsibility by making it the duty of the 
parent not so much to see that the child does as it is told 
but to aid the child in willing that which is good for all ; 
it increases authority by adding to the will of the parent 



BEGINNING AT HOME 111 

the will of the child. It makes parents educators of wills 
instead of dictators of actions. Authority is increased 
as it passes from autocracy, which has authority only as 
long as the governed are too weak to resist, to a common 
social good will. 

METHODS OF FAMILY TRAINING 

What, then, are the methods? By affording each mem- 
ber a steadily developing experience of participation in 
all the joys and duties, the service and responsibilities of 
the home; by ceasing to think of the family as a benev- 
olent autocracy on one side with the children as passive 
beneficiaries on the other; by beginning to think of and 
steadily cultivating the habit of regarding the home as 
the common possession of all, of its life as a common life 
in which all have a share and toward which all have serv- 
ice to render. 

Democratic parents train democratic children by mak- 
ing possible the democratic family. The first thing 
needed is that parents shall " repent," change their minds. 
Perhaps, even before that, we need repentance on the part 
of society, a change of social mind so that all shall think 
of marriage and home-making in democratic terms, in the 
light of the needs of society. We might be frank enough 
to recognize that the foundations of home-making, the 
desire for children, are at one with the central motive of 
democracy, the passion for lives. Then we might con- 
sider mating in terms of possible lives. A democracy 
cannot afford that the means by which new lives are 
given to it should be shrouded in social superstition or 
its processes of increase regarded as accidents, or ca- 
tastrophes. We shall recognize that families are 
founded for social ends, in order that children may be 
born and trained. Accordingly we shall prepare those 
who are to give children to society ; we shall not only 
train them to competency in physical parenthood but also 



112 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

to efficiency in spiritual, in guiding minds, developing 
spirits and educating persons. The true spirit of de- 
mocrac}^ grows in parents as they realize these vital re- 
sponsibilities to the whole of society, as they think of 
their home life in the light of the claims of the world of 
which it is a part. 

The democratic home will be guided hy the rights of 
the child. It will be organized in the light of his right to 
a full share in social living through the use and posses- 
sion of its resources ; in the light of his right to a share 
in its life of service, of common work and fellowship. 
Think out the home life as we think out our civic life 
when we say, " The school belongs, not to the school 
board, but to us all." Just as children have learned to 
say, " We must not destroy the trees in the parks nor 
the lamps on the street because they belong to us all," 
so in the home they learn to think of a common sharing 
of all possessions and to develop both a sense of social 
rights and of social responsibilities. The point may seem, 
at first, an insignificant one, that children should feel 
that the possessions in the home belong to them. But 
the principle is fundamental; any ideal identity of inter- 
ests rests on real interests ; we are never a part of the 
state until we realize that the concrete property of the 
state is ours. A child passes to a new attitude when he 
comes to the sense of the plural possessive. This is the 
attitude he must take toward the state; he acquires it as 
a natural attitude in the home when the sense of common 
possession is real, practical and habitual.^ 

The problems of discipline give way before the practice 
of democracy in the family. This is not because de- 
mocracy is some happy cure-all for the waywardness of 
children and the arbitrariness of parents, but because 

1 On the development of the communal spirit in the home see Chap- 
ter VIII of " Religious Education in the Family," Henry F. Cop^ 
University of Chicago Press, 1916. 



BEGINNING AT HOME 113 

democracy is a process of substituting a common purpose 
for conflicting wills. The problems of family discipline 
arise from conflicting wills. It is true that the will of 
one may be right and that of the other wrong, but the 
purpose of the home is not achieved by forcing the wrong 
will to yield to the right. The vanquished does not 
thereby learn to will the right. On the contrary, a van- 
quished one is not vanquished in will ; he is commonly only 
strengthened to resist. Even though, at last, all resist- 
ance is worn down, no gain has been made ; on the con- 
trary a serious loss has occurred; he has lost the power 
of resistance. Where the will is " broken " through dis- 
ciplinary conflicts in the family, the child is robbed of 
one of the powers he will seriously need in life. And yet, 
the parent's problem seems to be this : " Shall I give up 
to the child .^ " However, is it true that the only alterna- 
tives are either the child's giving up or the parent's yield- 
ing.? 

Democracy has a better way. It seeks to discover a 
common purpose which both can will ; it seeks to develop, 
in all situations, a common will. This is not the same as 
a compromise ; it does not mean the parent consenting 
to this on condition that the child agrees to that. It is 
rather the gradual development of a common social pur- 
pose which being seen and followed by all the members of 
the family group secures harmony and unity of action. 
Democratic training means more than securing a modus 
operandi between parents and children ; it means patiently 
developing ideals, purposes, plans, methods and, most 
potent of all, compelling enterprises which are accepted 
by all members of the group. Thinking things over to- 
gether, discussing them and doing them together, a com- 
mon will is developed. Through experience in common 
enterprises a social will is formed; unity of action is se- 
cured, with freedom of wills. 

A common social wUl is secured only under freedom. 



114 EDtJCATiON FOIl DEMOCRACY 

Nothing can be imposed on the will. Democracy in af- 
fairs rests on democracy of the spirit. If the family is 
to train for democracy it must give every member free- 
dom to exercise his powers of judgment, choice and will. 
This can take place only through real participation in 
family government and management. To be concrete: 
we will suppose that the B — family, living in the city, are 
considering moving to another house or apartment. The 
selection of a future home could be made by the parents 
alone; but, in the democratic family, no decision is made 
until all the members have considered the matter, until, 
as in a council, all have thoroughly discussed the situa- 
tion. Commonly the reasons for removal, the advan- 
tages of different situations, of streets and types of 
homes, of costs and upkeep, are all regarded as details to 
be settled by the omniscient heads of the household; but 
they are all vital to the interests of every one ; they af- 
fect the well-being of each one. And they affect the daily 
conduct of each. Thorough discussion has several direct 
effects : it gives a sense of participation which quickens 
responsibility ; it commits each one to the family enter- 
prise ; it quickens thought on the problems of family life ; 
it presents unconsciously and indirectly aspects of many 
moral problems and ideals. When a decision is reached 
it is the decision of all, it expresses the will of all. The 
consciousness of unity, of common purpose, responsibil- 
ity and action is strengthened and tends to carry over 
into all the current of family life. This one incident has 
furnished an experience in democratic living. 

Does this matter seem trivial? It is no trifle for chil- 
dren to think habitually of family life as a social expe- 
rience in which they always have a full share. It is no 
trifle when they pass from the home passively to regarding 
it actively. It is no trifle when this kind of experience 
goes on, day after day, so that all the children are un- 
consciously forming habits of social cooperation. 



BEGINNING AT HOME 115 

But supposing, in the instance just cited, that no com- 
mon unanimous decision is possible? Everything then 
on the practical side depends on the degree to which the 
members have already practiced this method of democ- 
racy. In beginning, it is best to learn through lesser 
experiences, through the everyday life. But a disagree- 
ment calls for the exercise of the larger social will, the 
will that chooses to ignore my own interests for the sake 
of the interests of others and especially for the interests 
of the larger number. It is an opportunity to practice 
the principle on which our social life proceeds, that even 
the clear interests of the few must often give way to the 
welfare of the many, that individual rights cease to be 
rights when they conflict with social rights. Such a les- 
son is learned in the laboratory of life, but children may 
receive it through instruction, — care should be taken to 
make the welfare of all so clear to them that they will 
cheerfully sacrifice individual preferences, and the realiza- 
tion of the joy of the social will then becomes their own 
through experience. 

LABORATORY EXPERIENCE 

The family, as a school of democracy, applies the edu- 
cational principle that learning comes by doing. It main- 
tains constant experience in social action and thus it is 
a training school in the habits of social living. It is 
either making social citizens or selfish individuals. It 
is doing this, not by the adoption of codes of action, nor 
by even the wise counsels of parents, but by the direction 
of activity. It forms habits by guiding repeated actions, 
strengthening them with desirable associations and illum- 
ining them with ideals. It makes social citizens by guid- 
ing its members into social activity within its own circle. 
All the relationships of the family are socially interpreted. 
Its duties are not tasks for the " head," nor are they 
" chores " in the day's routine ; they are simply a part 



116 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

of the common life, the part which each one plays in tlie 
life of all. They are not tasks at all ; they are as much 
a part of life as breathing or eating. 

The child needs to begin very early to learn the life 
of a democracy, the life of constant social cooperation. 
In few ways could we be more cruel than we are when- 
ever we attempt to train a child for a life free from labor. 
The " primeval curse " was not that of work, but that 
of sweating for mere bread. Work is man's high priv- 
ilege ; it is the point at which he effectively becomes a part 
of the world. Children need real work in the family. 
They are being trained in social pauperism where servants 
do everything. It is true that modern conditions have 
deprived the home of many forms of activity ; but we only 
suppose that they have taken all those forms because we 
lack imagination to see the new ones that arise and that 
are constantly developing and changing as economic con- 
ditions change. A boy may not be able to bring the wood 
and water into the modern home, but he can run the 
vacuum cleaner and he will not be degraded by washing 
dishes, or he can help in the cooking. To his society 
these tasks are just as essential — and therefore just as 
honorable, despite our prejudices — as desk work or sell- 
ing goods in the larger world. Those who would be 
ashamed to have their children work at home may be yet 
more ashamed to find they have trained those who will 
not work, as social cooperators, in the larger human fam- 

It may seem to many that dishwashing has very little 
to do with democracy, that such trivial affairs weigh noth- 
ing as compared with the high task of inspiring the 3'oung 
with the splendid ideals of our country, with love for the 
flag and devotion to national destiny. Such judgments 
left us, in an hour of great national need, with an over^ 
stock of rhetorical patriots and a shortage of effective 
^servants. But the hour of national need also brought 



BEGINNING AT HOME IIT 

out the splendid spectacle of the " dollar-a-year " men, 
the leaders of great commercial and industrial enterprises, 
who willingly gave their time, working long hours, under 
difficult conditions, and without compensation, for the 
national service. They were men to whom work was the 
natural thing ; they were habitually active and mentally 
cooperative. They are not produced in a single hour of 
opportunity. They come out of a long training in the 
habits of active contribution to life. Such habits depend 
for their strength very largely on early beginnings ; they 
are acquired, not by waiting to do some splendid, ideal 
thing, but by doing everything that one can do on every 
possible occasion. They begin with the trifles of every- 
day service. 

Education for democracy is a widening social expe- 
rience. It is possible to have a home in which every mem- 
ber actively shares, making a contribution of service, and 
yet no education for democracy takes place. The school 
of democracy must take a social attitude to all life. It 
is not only a little democracy within itself ; it is part of 
a larger society. The family can easily become a selfish 
institution. It can develop unsocial attitudes in chil- 
dren by failing to take, as a society, an attitude of com- 
mon living and service toward its community, toward 
other homes and the city and state. The life of democ- 
racy is not alone that of individuals who cooperate with 
and contribute toward other lives ; it is rather the life of 
groups which work, as groups, for the social whole. The 
family trains in the group life, but it must also train 
in the life of the group for the whole. It must be con- 
ceived as a part of society having a common life with all 
the rest, under the obligations of service and inheriting 
the joys of self-giving. 

The democratic family makes the democratic citizen. 
Its attitude, as an entire group, expresses its social con- 
sciousness and trains in habits of democratic relationships 



118 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

to society as a whole. There are families which are 
ethically and socially marooned by their own selfish spirit. 
They live only to themselves. A home is separated in 
order that it may be socially integrated. It is not a band 
of persons associated to secure advantages over all other 
bands. It is a social group which so fully learns social 
living that it looks out on all its community as a field 
of opportunity. This involves the difficult problem of 
developing a sense of universal brotherhood through fam- 
ily living. 

To save itself democracy miist save the family. But 
what of inefficient families, without moral consciousness.'* 
It is suggested that we will meet this difficulty by the 
changes that are now taking place in the narrowing of 
the area of family life, and the tendency to transfer its 
functions to other institutions. Perhaps something may 
be accomplished in this direction when we have invented 
a process to be substituted for parenthood. When chil- 
dren can be born without mothers and fathers we may 
get along without families. The psychological parent- 
hood that broods over the child during all its years of 
growth up to manhood is as real a fact as the physiolog- 
ical parenthood that brings him into life. We have to 
remember, what is more important, that, with all its short- 
comings, psychological parenthood is still the most potent 
force within our knowledge for the purposes of develop- 
ing character. No mechanizations of education can take 
the place of people. A phonograph repeating French 
phrases may be just the thing to teach the language to 
a bank clerk, but a phonograph can never teach life to 
any one. Moral training is not a matter of reciting les- 
sons, but of learning what life means and then feeling, 
willing, and doing aright toward it. That is a lesson that 
needs all possible reenforcements in affections, ideals and 
examples. 



BEGINNING AT HOME 119 



THE FAMILY AS A SOCIAL NECESSITY 

We too readily assume that the family is either an eco- 
nomic accident or a social institution founded on physio- 
logical conditions ; it is vastly more, it is a social insti- 
tution evolved out of the developing necessities of human 
nature. The breeding of babies does not absolutely neces- 
sitate a family, but the breeding of human creatures does, 
for that is a process of slow and long continued growth. 
Men and women are not bom full-grown morally ; they 
have to acquire the art of living in this world. We can 
easily establish institutions for feeding, clothing, and 
teaching infants, but we cannot find a substitute for the 
family group which will do its work of fitting people to 
live in the world in social relations. The family is a so- 
cial necessity in democracy because it is that school 
which the nature of man has developed as necessary for 
his training for social living. 

Granted the necessity of the experience found in family 
life, it is evident that we do not solve the problem of in- 
efficient families by wiping them out and substituting an 
institution. It becomes the responsibility of society to 
see that we substitute good families for bad ones. And 
this is one of the first social duties of a democracy. It 
will first make fully efficient that which first deals with 
lives and deals with them most effectively. 

Now all this is so elementary as hardly to seem worth 
the saying. But the fact is that, elementary as it is, we 
have gone no further than to talk about it ; we have failed 
to act on the simple concept of family life as the essen- 
tial and altogether fundamental element in the moral 
training of a people. We will spend without stint for 
schools but the State is unwilling to spend for improving 
family life ; that is to say, we are willing to take all sorts 
of pains to build moral citizenship, beginning when the 



120 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

foundations have already been laid, but we are unwilling 
to spend any thought or money on these foundations. 

Democracy must protect the family. The first step 
necessary, in order that the family may meet the present 
moral crisis, is to give it a chance to do its work. Such 
industrial and economic adjustments must be made as 
will give fathers and mothers a chance to have healthy 
children and a chance to influence them healthfully in their 
moral development. No matter what the industrial order 
may seem to demand of the father no State can afford 
to have children growing up who have been robbed of 
the sight of his face and his friendship. The rights of 
the child and the rights of the State of to-morrow de- 
mand that we shall not rob either of the value of hours 
of leisure in the family. To build fortunes by grinding 
the face of the poor is to steal from the citizenship of to- 
morrow for the lust of to-day. The hovel in which the 
family is forced to live to-day simply means that we put 
that family to the school of hovel living, taking lessons 
in building cities of hovels for us all to live in to-morrow. 

We build our cities so that there is no real family life. 
We mourn over this as a sentimental loss but a practical 
necessity. So short-sighted are we that we fail to see 
that it is not the sentiment of the past we are losing, but 
the citizenship of the future we are dwarfing and distort- 
ing. The tenement not only represents the loss of the 
ideals of the " Cotter's Saturday Night " ; it represents 
economic pressure throttling human spirits. Wherever 
economic considerations alone dictate conditions they rob 
the man of to-morrow of the one school that can make a 
real man of him, the one that can surely prevent his be- 
ing a social burden or menace. 

Whatever robs the child of his rights to-day robs so- 
ciety of its portion to-morrow. We cannot steal from 
the child of to-day without despoiling ourselves in vastly 
greater measure in the future. 



BEGINNING AT HOME 121 

Democracy must train Jwme-makers. The second step 
necessary is to take this school of moral living so seri- 
ously that we will train its teachers for their highest task. 
We have normal colleges to train teachers in the meth- 
ods of the knowledge that children must acquire in schools ; 
we insist that all teachers shall establish their fitness. 
But we make no conditions of efficiency for the effective 
teachers of morality. We assume that the high office of 
parenthood is acquired by accident, that while one must 
take a course in domestic science before cooking an egg, 
any one can teach life to a child. The State would have 
a perfect right to demand before issuing a marriage li- 
cense that parents prove both their physiological fitness 
and their ability to train children. 

At any rate, we may set many capable agencies at work 
preparing parents. If the church would teach its people 
directly, practically, how to make their homes better, it 
must do more than give us sermons about a " home over 
there.'* We need homes over here just now; the rest will 
take care of itself. We need classes to turn from dis- 
cussing the genealogies of the Old Testament to a study 
of family life here.^ We need to develop the efficiency 
of our public schools and colleges in this direction. Why 
teach young people everything in the world except the 
one thing that is greatest and most important of all 
in the world to them.'^ We need an educated public opin- 
ion that will see how fundamental to all true democracy 
is the right social experience in the family. Then we 
might hope that, for its own sake, the state would be 
willing to spend at least as much in aiding the family 
to eflSciency and competency as it now spends in improv- 
ing farms and orchards. 

Because the family, through its normal experiences of 
democracy, is the earliest and most influential agency in 

1 See the author's discussion of this subject in " Religious Educa- 
tion in the Church," Ch. XVIII, Scribners, 1917. 



122 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

training democrats, society must begin here its work of 
social organization ; it must first develop efficiencies for 
its purposes. It must give new thought and make wiser 
provision for the life of the family. Until the home be- 
comes in the mind of the educator and in the public vi- 
sion more important than the school or the college social 
reconstruction works under a perpetual handicap. They 
work wisely who begin at beginnings,^ 

1 The Religious Education Association, Chicajsro, 111,, publishes, 
free, a very useful short bibliography on " Religious Nurture in 
the Home," prepared by Mary E. Moxcey, and including the more 
important titles dealing with the general problems suggested in 
this chapter. 



CHAPTER X 

DEMOCRATIC TRAINING THROUGH THE CHURCH 

The modern church is both the product and the prophet 
of democracy. Ideally a church is a free social organ- 
ization of persons associated for the purpose of realizing 
in men the divine ideal and in society the kingdom of God. 
It seeks to lead men into godliness in a god-willed society. 
In other words, its purpose is that of a spiritual democ- 
racy. 

If the central spirit of democracy is religious, if its 
prime needs always will be a spiritual interpretation of 
life and a Christian motive to guide action, then the 
church must be the principal agency through which this 
kind of democracy can be realized. That is, however, 
supposing that the church is in our society the principal 
agency of the spiritual life. 

Democracy needs churches. These religious societies 
which we call churches have grown out of the needs of 
democracy. If the autocratic state finds it needs the 
absolutist and authoritative church, how much more does 
democracy find it needs the guidance of those ideals and 
that light that develops as men freely associate in search 
of the ultimate values and meanings of life. Democracy 
needs not alone a spiritual ideal; it needs definite formu- 
lations and expressions of that ideal. It needs the ex- 
pression of that ideal in social purposes which gather men 
and direct them toward spiritual aims. It needs, in or- 
der that all its life may be saturated with religion, many 
definite social foci of religion. 

The special part which the church plays in relation to 

the development of democracy is an educational one. 

123 



124 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

This is because the function of the church is essentially 
educational, it is that of social organization for the 
growth of lives and the direction of society. Much has 
been written on the educational work of the church/ so 
that only one aspect of that work in relation to democ- 
racy will be developed at this time. 

In order that the church may prepare men and women 
for democracy it must offer them a real experience in de- 
mocracy. To belong to a church must be to enjoy a 
progressive experience of life in an ideal democracy. Per- 
haps the most important, the most influential relation 
which the church effects with any person comes neither 
through preaching, nor classes, nor worship, that is, not 
through any of these alone, but through the social expe- 
rience of belonging to the church. Unconsciously we 
conceive church membership as a social experience ; but 
the church appears hardly to recognize the value and 
the effects of all those relationships, activities and expe- 
riences which constitute its life. It is a society ; its chief 
power over lives is a social power, the force of the life 
of the whole group on the one and the effect of the ex- 
perience of living in the group. What men shall be is 
determined less by what the minister says, by what teach- 
ers teach or by what forms are followed than by the kind 
of life they find inside the church group. Is it an au- 
tocracy .f* Then they become accustomed to think of their 
ideal society as autocratic. Is it an oligarchy? then, as 
their ideal society, it glorifies oligarchy and retards de- 
mocracy. 

While there are wide differences in institutional forms 
there is not so very much difference in social spirit in 
the churches. An Episcopal church may be more demo- 
cratic than a Baptist congregation in spite of the well- 

1 See the author's " Religious Education in the Church," (Scrib- 
ners, 1918) which gives references to practically all the recent 
literature on this subject in English. 



TRAINING THROUGH THE CHURCH 125 

known democratic form of government belonging to the 
latter. But, whatever the form, the fact remains that, 
on the M'hole, the modern church is not a democratic in- 
stitution. It may be well to look at a few evidences to 
support this statement. Many churches, the greater num- 
ber, neglect the first principle of democracy, that the so- 
cial organization exists for the sake of the lives of its 
people. They do not exist for lives ; they are organized 
to maintain customs, institutions and forms of thought. 
They are not judged by their service for lives; they are 
judged by their success in developing institutional effi- 
ciency, in buildings, plant, finances, and membership. 
The impressive purpose of " saving souls " usually means 
securing adherents to the institution. Nothing could bet- 
ter prove that the churches are indifferent to the chief 
motive and ideal of democracy than the fact that they 
give the place of least importance to the person of great- 
est import in a democracy, the child. They do not seek 
to develop lives ; if they did they would spend their chief 
energies on lives when they can be most influenced, when 
development is really taking place, in childhood. The 
church will continue to lag behind the democracy of its 
own day and of the state until it pays at least as much 
attention to the child as does the modem democratic 
state. 

What then should be done? Furnish every life with a 
progressive experience vn democracy. This cannot be ac- 
complished by substituting deacons for elders or pastors 
for bishops. It will not come from without but, rising 
within, determining the life of the local society, the spirit 
of democracy will in time change the character of the 
entire institution and remove the vestiges of monarchial 
forms and vassalage. 

Beginning with the child the church will furnish the 
child a child's experience of democracy. Ideally, for the 
child, democracy is an enveloping, protecting, nurturing 



126 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

society devoted to the chief purpose of developing his life. 
To the child to live in a democracy is like living in a fam- 
ily, it is an experience which reveals life as favorable to 
his development, as stimulating, inviting, alluring him 
out into living. This is true in the family because the 
family exists to nurture the child. It is true in democ- 
racy because democracy exists for the sake of lives. To 
such social environment and stimulus the child responds 
not only by a natural growth but also by an increasing 
consciousness of life in terms of growth. Thus he learns 
to live the life of democracy through the experience of the 
nurture of democracy. Where are the churches that offer 
'to the children of their communities a society devoted to 
enveloping, protecting, nurturing their lives? They may 
be found; but it is with difficulty. 

THE CHILD-CENTRIC CHURCH 

The first step, then, toward a truly democratic church, 
will be to set the child in the midst. This will be done in 
the practical manner in which democratic communities are 
now doing the same thing. The evidence of the child- 
centric community is the school-house, the teaching force, 
the playgrounds and the determination of custom and 
regulation by the needs of child-life. The largest house 
the community builds for itself is the child's house, the 
school. Is this true of the church? The heartiest and 
most immediate response of a community always comes to 
an appeal for the child's welfare, for playgrounds or civic 
betterment in their behalf. What is the response of the 
church to appeals for the child's needs? The best brains 
of the community are devoted to the training of the child. 
Is this true in the church? 

We meet with so much confusion and difficulty in reli- 
gious ideas, knowledge and efficiencies because the young 
have failed to receive religious training. To men and 
women religion is an unreal or an extraneous interest be- 



TRAINING THROUGH THE CHURCH 127 

cause in childhood there was for them no normal and 
continuous association with religion. To the child the 
church is so remote, as an institution, that we institute 
schemes of artificial direction to bring children under the 
influence of the church. This simply means that the 
church does not function in their lives. It cannot func- 
tion for them until it ministers to them according to their 
needs, until, as a society, it takes the democratic attitude 
of devotion to their lives. When the church assumes that 
attitude a new situation is created. The child is no longer 
an outsider. Responsibility unites him to the church. It 
may not be a formal union of membership ; it is a union 
of nurture. That is the union the child can feel and 
understand. When the church says, " Our resources all 
belong to these children," it will come to pass that the 
children will say of themselves, " We belong to this 
church." That is the only vital kind of belonging. It 
is the union that exists in a family; children belong be- 
cause the family is theirs. 

Out of this attitude of prim?iry devotion to the needs, 
to the lives of these little ones there will grow the neces- 
sary provisions for their development. No forms of or- 
ganizations, no schools, classes nor anything else can min- 
ister to them unless all are but simple expressions of this 
attitude of devotion, unless they manifest this purpose as 
the chief purpose of the church. 

The church will furnish a developing experience of de- 
mocracy to groxmng persons. The life of the growing 
child will respond to the attitude of the church by devo- 
tion to its ideals and purposes. The democratic church 
will afford opportunities for the child to express his devo- 
tion to its life aim. He will find himself as a member of 
a society with a purpose. He will learn what that pur- 
pose means ; he will be taught how it may be realized. 
The church will teach him how to live. If it is organized 
to develop lives it will make the lessons of living its chief 



128 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

teaching concern. But it will do more than talk about 
living; it will furnish the laboratory of life. That active 
response under which the child acquires the sense of be- 
longing will continue only as long as he can project his 
life into the society.'" Here is the fatal weakness in the 
plans of many churches ; they do much for children, but 
they make no provision for the child to live his life in 
the life of the church. Children do not belong save 
through the realities of their experience. The church is 
a real society only as each one in some way can share 
its life, its activities and service. 

The church mil direct experience toward the ideals of 
democracy. As a society it is one of the best schools of 
social living. But it may be a society without being a 
democracy; it may have unworthy ends and exist socially 
in spite of unsocial motives. Mere association does not 
make a real society ; social motives, social purposes and 
social living all are necessar3\ So, also, the church be- 
comes a democracy not by the elementary expedient of 
permitting each person to vote at its official meetings, but 
by consciously associating persons for the democratic pur- 
pose of nurturing lives and serving society. It is a fel- 
lowship of the spirit for the spiritual ends of democracy, 
that men may have life more abundantly. The experience 
of church membership is a reality only as it is an expe- 
rience in common devotion to the ends of democracy. The 
purposes of the church with a person are not achieved 
merely by getting his membership ; they are achieved as 
he becomes a living and active part of its spirit, its activ- 
ity and its program. ) The essence of the Pauline figure 
of the church as a body is that the members are in the 
body only as they live its life, onl}^ as they actively func- 
tion in its work. The church makes democrats by giving 
every one a share in its spiritual work for society. 

The ideal social life is realized in active service. / This 
experience of the life of democracy, as sharing and' self- 



^ 



TRAINING THROUGH THE CHURCH 129 

giving, is possible at very early stages of life. It is not 
reserved for the mature man any more than real partici- 
pation in national life is reserved for adults. Ask the 
small boy on the street if he is an American ; he will not 
tell you that he has to wait until he can vote. He al- 
ready belongs. Perhaps nothing has so strengthened his 
sense of belonging as the practical things which the nation 
has called on him to do. To plant and care for a " war- 
garden," to sell stamps, to serve as a messenger in some 
patriotic organization is just as important, as vital and 
as valuable to the boy as anything his father can do as 
a voter or his big brother as a soldier. So children in 
the church are finding a part as important and, in the 
whole scheme of spiritual democracy, as essential as any 
that the adult may have. One can only refer to the many 
interesting projects of services which children carry for- 
ward in their classes or their own societies.^ We must 
see, however, that these projects are not simply schemes 
to amuse them, not simply devices which clever adults in- 
vent to serve as toys for the very young, but that they are 
the forms of normal activity along which the child's life 
moves out ; they are as natural and real to them as our 
work to us. Their purpose is not to hold children in 
the church until they are old enough to be useful ; their 
purpose is positive, to let the child live out every ideal 
he has or can get./ 

The provision^ which the church makes for children and 
the young, so that they may have an experience of reli- 
gion as life and service, is a corollary of our modern 
emphasis on the reality of the child's religious experience. 
If he is a spiritual being then he has rights in the church 

1 See the plans suggested by Miss Rankin in " Religious Education 
for Beginners," December, 1917, " Handwork in Religious Educa- 
tion," A. G. Wardle, U. of Chicago Press, 1916; "Graded Social 
Service in the Sunday School," W. N. Hutchins, U. of Chicago 
Press, 1914, " Religious Education Through Activities," H. B. Robins 
(a free pamphlet), American Baptist Publication Society, 1918. 



A 



130 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

which are equal to those of any other person. To object 
that his rights are less because he is immature is to sug- 
gest rather that his rights are greater because his needs 
are greater. No matter what our adult desires may be 
our duty is perfectly plain, we must cease to think of the 
church as a community institution in which we adults 
" have our little day," we must learn to think of it as the 
association of the community's spiritual forces in order 
that every life may have its full day. That will force us 
to give the child an opportunity for activity in the church. 
That will compel some resignations. It will make us 
ashamed, instead of proud, of saying that we have held 
an office for forty years. It will apply logically the 
principle that since the young have their religious Hfe to 
live there must be for them religious work to do, respon- 
sibilities to acquire and joys of accomplishment to expe- 
rience. 

FACING AN ACTUAL WORLD 

If the church is to be an experieiwe in democracy/ it 
must face the realities of this present world. Men are 
to-day so far from the church because the church has set 
itself so far from men. It is not long since many, per- 
haps most, churches were ashamed to have any concern 
for human affairs ; often they affected to separate them- 
selves so thoroughly from the secular that they gave no 
care to sickness, human misery and need. But a spiritual 
democracy is in the very core of life; it is the life of the 
people. It cannot lift itself above the human. It knows 
nothing as spiritual that is not also human. It is con- 
cerned with men now, and not so much with their shrouded 
past or their unknown future. The world it would save 
is a world of men and women. Then religion becomes not 
a speculation about anything, but an experience. Doubt- 
less it will be said that the church must remain unspotted 
from the world. Of course she must, but there would 



TRAINING THROUGH THE CHURCH 131 

have been no need for such an injunction if she was to 
remain aloof. There is no danger of being spotted save 
as one gets into the crowd. Then the best preventive 
of soil is ser\^ice. The modern church must go through 
the experience of the modern university. It has passed 
from a remote, cloistered affair into a laboratory of life 
set in the midst of the affairs of men. To-day it func- 
tions in the field and the factory. If the church is to edu- 
cate for democracy it will be not by quiet, dignified re- 
treats of instruction but by prophetic leadership in the 
ways of men, by living the life of the people, by dealing 
with their real and present problems. 

Need one insist again that present-day reality loses no 
whit of religion, that the great Teacher of the church 
drew men because He treated the realities of their imme- 
diate lives on the plane of the eternal? To-day the at- 
traction which some preachers have is due to the fact 
that they speak the language of our present experience. 
There are two extremes of attraction in modern preach- 
ing; one is that of the seer who deals with the eternally 
true, the deep and high places which abide forever; we 
answer to his voice, as deep to deep, because those things 
of which he speaks are the unchanging verities of all life. 
The other type speaks of our every-day plans and prob- 
lems; his language is that on our week-day lips. We 
answer because of the note of reality and because of our 
need for help and guidance in these present problems. 
Can no man combine these two messages ; cannot the man 
who has been on the mount bring its light into our dark- 
ened valley and help us to see these realities of sin and 
sorrow, of affection and joy in the splendor of the vi- 
sion eternal and glorious? Unless that can be done 
preaching is likely to be an outworn custom. Democracy 
needs the prophet. But he must speak in a known tongue 
about real things and with that voice of authority that 
comes from touch with the eternal. 



132 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

Democracy needs spiritual guidance. The prophet who 
deals with realities must ever be something more than a 
photographer or a newspaper; he is a seer. He deals 
with the present that the future may be determined. He 
leads forward. Democracy is ever in evolution and its 
course is determined by the dominant ideals of the people. 
When we lose faith in the potency of ideals we turn back- 
ward. If we do not believe in the vision we perish. The 
sense of reality must not dim the light or lower the stand- 
ards of ideals which the church gives to its age. Yet 
those ideals find their natural and most helpful expression 
in forms of reality. Just as it is vastly more effective 
to speak of a splendid future in which no children shall 
toil in factories, no men be slaves to others than it is to 
generalize the picture, so the church makes her vision plain 
by definitel}^ pointing out possible reforms and improve- 
ments. It can translate righteousness into immediately 
practical forms of right-dealing and relationships. Some 
may sneer at these " impractical " ideals ; but the church 
can practice them and then proclaim them. She must 
insist not only on looking present-day reality in the face 
but on picturing before men the realities of a forward- 
looking righteousness ; she must make real the ideals of 
men. 

A real experience in democracy will reveal those spirit- 
ual values for which democracy exists. Belonging to a 
church ought to be a continuous process of the discovery 
of the joy and splendor of knowing people, of human 
friendships. In the very simplest and most practical man- 
ner it ought to make us prize just people above all other 
prizes that life has to offer. 

" Hand 

Grasps hand; eye lights eye in good friendship 

And great hearts expand, 

And grow one in the sense of this world's life." 

— Browning, " Saul." 



^'i^^f. 



TRAINING THROUGH THE CHURCH 133 

This is something we are in danger of losing. ^Our 
hurried life leaves little time to cultivate these human 
values that become ours only in friendship and intercourse. 
But this consciousness of human values as the supreme 
worth of life will go much deeper than the joys of friend- 
ship ; where the church serves life its people will learn 
the joy of seeing lives grow. The very stuff of life seems 
here to come out more vividly and distinctly than anywhere 
else. No enriching can come to any life greater than that 
which is ours when we see that we have been able to help 
a life, when we, perhaps, can see young men and women 
stimulated, year after year, until our hope for them is 
passed in their fine lives. 

LEAVEN MUST BE IN THE LUMP 

The democratization of the church will involve a more 
general fusing of its life with the lives of all the people. 
It is still a separated institution. It is still a class affair, 
belonging to the group called " church people." The 
great streams of city life flow on untouched by it. Its 
ministries do not really reach the mass for they are im- 
posed by an external and socially foreign institution. 
There are very few instances in which, even in smaller 
places, the church is so much of a community affair that 
it can be said to be the church of all the people. This is 
largely due to the fact that a church is still regarded 
as a group of people integrated by certain intellectual 
statements or by certain special customs. It does not 
seek to spread its real life to all ; it seeks to draw the 
lives of all into itself. It does not belong to the com- 
munity ; persons in the community belong to it. Churches 
in a community are commonly small islands of intellec- 
tual, or of emotional coherence in a sea of practical in- 
difference. Few are social leaven ; most are more nuclea- 
tive than disseminating. Apparently the church is effec- 
tive in educating only those who are already in its group. 



134 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

so that the great flood of democracy moves on not imme- 
diately influenced by its work. 

If the church is really democratic it will gather to it- 
self all the spiritual life of its comraunity. It will be- 
come inclusive of all spiritual purpose and power. It will 
become the fellowship of all who seek the good and the 
clearing house of all who serve their fellows. It will 
polarize scattered idealisms. Its emphasis will not be so 
much on differentiation as on association, assimilation and 
inspiration. Its fellowship will be, not through forms 
or through philosophies, but through common ideals, pur- 
poses and service. The development of popular forums 
indicates something of what is possible. Here there are 
no formal conditions of membership; the people are asso- 
ciated and united in their common interests. Somewhere 
the people will find common spiritual centers. Their so- 
cial idealism will be polarized in integrating rather than 
in segregating agencies. The tendencies are quite clear. 

In some communities the public school, with its social 
center, parents' clubs and recreational program, has be- 
come the means of nucleating social ideals, stimulating 
activities, enlarging vision and uniting workers. Com- 
munity organizations, bringing all who desire the common 
good into one fellowship, are doing the very work that 
churches should do. In an age that does not hesitate to 
pay the highest price to make the world a decent place 
to live in our former, narrow conditions of spiritual fel- 
lowship seem wholly ridiculous. A democratic church 
must find a basis for membership sufficiently broad to em- 
brace all who give themselves in true devotion to the 
higher and spiritual purposes of democracy. It must 
associate all who set spiritual values first. Its test will 
be ability to bring together all good men, to bind them 
in common ideals and to send them out in common serv- 
ice. 

Custom has so long bound us in the churches that it 



TRAINING THROUGH THE CHURCH 135 

now has an authority which is blindly accepted; it is the 
cause of our class and creedal divisions and our exclusive 
groupings. We search in vain elsewhere for a justifica- 
tion. It hides the simple, basic principles. If Chris- 
tianity is a democracy of the spirit its churches must 
be spiritual democracies. Unless they practice democracy 
they cannot persuade our world society to spiritual de- 
mocracy. Here, if anywhere, men must have the oppor- 
tunity to experience democracy on its highest levels. The 
educational function of the church cannot be discharged 
by telling the world about an ideal society ; the world 
needs a demonstration more than an exposition. Espe- 
cially it needs a demonstration of that fellowship of which 
the church has spoken so long. If any man is willing to 
learn Christ's way of life, if any is willing to live for the 
ends for which he lived, there ought to be a place for him 
in a church. And surely that way and those ends are 
perfectly clear to us to-day ; it was the way of a brother- 
hood ; it was the democratic purpose of pure devotion to 
the lives of all, to the realization of a social order deter- 
mined by spiritual rights, needs, duties and possibilities. 
To all accustomed to think in terms of denominational 
machinery proposals of this kind will seem to be fatally 
vague. Yet organized religion cannot lead democracy 
save as it is essentially a part of democracy, i If the 
church is a leaven it must be in the lump and not on the 
side of the mixing bowL If our organization efficiencies 
stand in the way of the saturation of community life with 
religion they are not efficiencies. We value many of them 
because they do effectively serve the whole institution as 
it is at present organized. But the business of a church 
is not that of serving an institution, it is that of saving 
society. To become effective in determining the char- 
acter of the democracy of to-morrow the church must be 
democratized to-day. Organized religion must become 
democratic if democracy is to be religious. 



136 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 



CHURCH MUST EXPERIENCE DEMOCRACY 

To become an experience in democracy the church must 
experience democracy, it must become a part of the life 
of democracy. In order that democracy may experience 
religion, religion must experience democracy. To satu- 
rate society with the religious ideal the bottle must be 
opened and the life-giving stream flow out. Then rigid 
lines of " membership " will stand out less prominently 
as separating walls. The membership that counts will be 
that of fellowship in common ideals and projects. Some- 
how we must realize on the splendid flood of good life, of 
spiritually minded persons, of those who seek the king- 
dom that is peace and righteousness, and who are now 
outside the churches. 

The church, in the education of democracy, will cawse 
democracy to become an experience m religion. It can 
lead democracy on from a political experiment into a 
spiritual reality as it reveals the spiritual nature of the 
work and the purposes of democracy. The church exists 
not alone to give society a religion it has not hitherto 
possessed but to help it to identify the religion it already 
has. Many are serving spiritual ends who would be sur- 
prised to have their work thus characterized. The tem- 
ple of God is neither in this place nor in that but it covers 
all the ways of men wherever men seek the purposes of 
iGod. True democracy is not something that may be 
made religious ; it is religious already in that it is de- 
voted to spiritual ends. Men find it hard to see this. The 
very word spiritual misleads them into thinking of some- 
thing strangely indefinite, belonging to another and un- 
known world. ^ They go on working for the well-being 
of all ; but they regard that as something quite separated 
from religion. Such persons, of whom there are many, 

1 As Pres. Henry C. King so well suggests, and explains, in his 
" Seeming Unreality of the Spiritual Life," Macmillan, 1914. 



TRAINING THROUGH THE CHURCH 137 

need to discover the religious character of every kind 
of service that determines the lives of men and the char- 
acter of society. They need to see that they are playing 
a part in forming the kingdom of goodwill and righteous- 
ness. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND DEMOCRACY'S PROGRAM 

If education is our dependence for all permanent social 
improvement public education is the peculiar method upon 
which democracy depends. 

The public school is the most democratic institution in 
American civil life ; it is democracy at work on its pecu- 
liar task of developing people into social unity and effi- 
ciency. It is democracy in action. Its development in 
American life is concurrent with national development from 
a republic organized for freedom to a democracy of free 
men organized for the fullness as well as the freedom of 
life. 

The public school, in the United States, has been at all 
times democratic in organization, a public institution in a 
special sense, maintained for the public, and governed by 
the public. It has been more immediately controlled by 
and responsive to local sentiment and ideals than any 
other public institution. Direction and control have been 
exercised in small local units. Each school has been kept 
very close to its own social group. Many efforts have 
been made to centralize control, to erect national educa- 
tional standards and to secure federal direction. Local 
control has not been an unmixed blessing; the system is in 
need of decided changes to meet present-day needs; cer- 
tainly centralized aid and direction is desirable; but the 
advantages have more than compensated for the losses. 
With all their short-comings local boards of education 
have been a force making for democracy, developing local 
responsibilities and keeping alive the immediate conscious- 
ness of education as a right and a duty. But for such a 

138 



THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS 139 

democratic system it would have been impossible to de- 
velop to their present efficiency the central agencies of 
counsel and stimulus such as the United States Bureau 
of Education and the voluntary organizations of educa- 
tors. 

Through its schools democracy/ edtucates itself. In an 
important sense public education educates the public. It 
is unfortunately true that the citizen knows little about 
educational theory and little about the real work of a 
school; but the very fact of the school as one of the 
heaviest charges in his taxes leads him to put, habitually, 
a relatively important valuation on its work of develop- 
ing lives. A platform orator recently hurled lurid de- 
nunciations against state legislators because they appro- 
priated more money to hog-conservation than to baby- 
saving. But, while admitting their shameful blindness to 
human values, we must not forget that the public school 
is weighty evidence that, after all, we do think more of 
children than of cattle. Our educational ideals may be 
hazy, or they may be archaic, but, in the last few decades, 
taxation for elementary and secondary education has 
more than doubled in ratio to population and — since this 
might mean nothing — the more important fact is that 
this larger investment has been made with greater intelli- 
gence than ever before. The marvelous growth in facili- 
ties and working staffs is not a thing separate from pub- 
lic life; the people cause this and they know they cause 
it. Their participation in the educational enterprise has 
led to a remarkable development of appreciation of its 
importance until, in normal times, it is accepted as our 
most important single social task. 

The development of public education — in enriched and 
extended curricula, increased facilities, larger and more 
beautiful buildings and enlarged and* more efficient teach- 
ing force — has been made possible because democracy 
has fixed its faith on public education. Such impressive 



140 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

developments are the results of large expectations as to 
public education. These expectations have changed and 
developed in recent years. When Horace Mann and 
Henry Barnard campaigned for common elementary edu- 
cation the people responded because they recognized that 
intelligence was necessary to public safety and to personal 
prosperity. But since that day the vision has been devel- 
oping until public education is seen as not only necessary 
for social protection but essential to social progress. To- 
day we look to the school not alone to keep growing citi- 
zens from wrong-doing but to stimulate them to right- 
living. One might speak of this as a development from 
protective education to constructive education. More and 
more the schools have a positive function, to guide the 
young into service for and devotion to the public good. 

Education m a democracy is directed toward ideal ends. 
America counts on the school to develop the American 
spirit, to make democrats. The public demands more 
than intelligence ; it demands an attitude of mind. In the 
trying days of the great war the school was called on not 
alone to teach things about democracy but to train in 
the life of democracy, to develop its spirit of service for 
life. It is true we are not altogether clear as to what 
this spirit implies ; we often confound mere sentiments of 
patriotism with devotion to the ideals of democracy. But 
the ideal is becoming clearer ; it emerges in practical ways, 
it reveals itself as the energies of school children are 
applied to forms of human, social service. And, looking 
forward, our principal concern is that the school shall 
inspire the young with motives and ideals adequate to the 
demands of to-morrow ; we grow impatient with political 
tricks with the school machinery and impatient with dis- 
cussions over categories of information, and we demand 
habits of life and attitudes of mind ; w^e expect the school 
to develop democratic citizens. Public sentiment regard- 
ing the school reveals the soul of America. No other in- 



THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS 141 

stitution is cherished so highly, no other guarded so zeal- 
ously. It is our one common institution of social ideals. 
It is the one on which we depend most completely for so- 
cial improvement and national salvation. 

Such high expectations as these are the bases for pop- 
ular criticism of the school. Like the church it is gener- 
ously criticized because its possibilities are generously 
appraised. Much of the criticism is negligible, but there 
is a deep and serious inquiry as to the kind of persons the 
school is producing. It inquires why, after so much edu- 
cational progress, there is, in schooling, still so little con- 
sciousness of direct social purpose .^^ The criticism that 
points to the juvenile-court records, to the growth of 
youthful crime and the spread of political corruption may 
not always be just but it is a clear indication of moral 
expectation. 

Democracy demands a moral product from its schools. 
The demand is entirely justifiable, for the ultimate pur- 
pose of education is moral and the primary needs of a 
democracy are moral and spiritual. Education is the 
organization and direction of social experience to the end 
that persons may be competent to live as social beings. 
Social living is essentially a moral process ; it involves 
every form of human relationship ; in it are included all 
the problems of life. Democratic living is a social and 
a moral process ; it is a matter of human behavior under 
social relations ; it involves all matters of the will, of 
ideals of habits, of conduct, of right and wrong. Our 
whole system of education is a farce so far as democracy 
is concerned, an utter failure, if it does no more than 
impart information, no more than give to the world so 
many million heads holding that which so many thou- 
sands of books already contain. We count on public 
education for no less than the growth of citizens who in- 
creasingly see and know and love the right, the social 
good, the democratic ideals of a world of righteousness 



142 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

and loving good-will, who increasingly devote themselves 
with growing intelligence and skill to these ends. 

A7nerican schooling has often turned its back on the 
realities of democracy. Many a boy comes out of high 
school knowing a good deal more about Athens and Carth- 
age than he knows of his own city ; the college student 
often recites on Plato's ideas on justice without the least 
thought of their possible applications to present social 
conditions. We train youth to shun the split infinitive 
with holy horror but we care not, educationally, whether 
they separate their neighbor's families or their fortunes. 
We tithe the mint and anise of dead conjugations and 
neglect the living principles of daily conduct. We are 
so burdened with learning we have no time to learn to 
live. As Sir Arthur Helps remarked of another day, 
" Some persons have learned so many languages they have 
ceased to think in any one." 

WHAT IS WRONG WITH EDUCATION? 

Better far to have been a boy educated in long-ago 
Egypt, where Plato says the " Youth were suffered neither 
to hear nor learn any verses or songs other than those 
which were calculated to inspire them with virtue," than 
to be one of the high-school youths whom one may see in 
almost any city, uncouth, flagrantly regardless of the 
rights of others, slaves to the cigarette, affecting blase 
cynicism on all ideal subjects, and boasting of filthy- 
mindedness and craft. Such lads do not represent their 
class ; but they are sufficiently numerous in the high-school 
crowd to give rise to serious thought. It is, of course, 
true that the school is neither wholly nor principally to 
blame, that selfish and foolishly indulgent parents must 
be called to account. But the question still remains, 
what are the schools doing to counteract the tendencies 
that cause such types to exist? Are they endeavoring to 
make good citizens out of these boys? If they fail to 



THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS 143 

meet squarely the problem created by these youths they 
acknowledge failure in their entire program. We are 
wasting a*lot of money on schools where cattle pens would 
do if we can only raise brutes. Ancient systems may be 
idealized, but our system will avail little until we have 
realized some of their ideals. 

Something is wrong when year after year our social 
statistics report, parallel to the decreases in illiteracy, 
appalling increases in juvenile delinquency. This is more 
than the result of increasingly exact regulation of youth 
life, and it is more than a matter of social awareness to 
offenses. Both these factors increase the figures, but they 
by no means account for the fact that boys commit the 
crimes that once were confined to men, that the crimes 
are actually more prevalent and often much more vicious. 
Our court records simply indicate that our methods of 
training for life have not kept pace with the developing 
moral demands of life. Properly to distribute the blame 
for this condition would call to account industrial, eco- 
nomic and social conditions, family life, the polarization 
of population in great cities, and those changes in social 
ideals under which we have passed from the concept of 
life in terms of discipline and endeavor for improvement 
to the concept of life as pleasure. But just here we are 
concerned with only one social institution, that which is 
charged with responsibility for training youth for the life 
of the state. What is it doing to prevent juvenile delin- 
quency.'^ 

The 'public schools have ideal possibilities. The school 
is an institution which has developed remarkable moral 
potentialities and which has a clearly stated ideal of moral 
purpose but has not organized those potentialities toward 
that purpose. No one can fail to see the moral power of 
the schools as social organizations. They are adminis- 
tered by a body of idealists, people who remain in that 
profession because it satisfies their ideals, because of a 



144 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

consciousness of sharing in the development of persons. 
If this is not the case it is hard to account for the fact 
that the pubHc-school system draws to itself the best 
brains and abilities of the country and holds them in its 
trying service. True there are many who are merely text- 
book mechanics ; but they are not representative of the 
great teaching body. To know the teachers in American 
public schools is to know a people with a passion and an 
ideal. Their eyes lighten whenever they have the chance 
to look above the wheels of the factory system of instruc- 
tion and to tell of what they are really doing with lives. 
Why not give these idealists a chance? 

The schools are least efficient in that vn which they are 
most potent. The schools have several distinct forms of 
moral education already in operation. First, they are 
forming character by the simple fact that they are asso- 
ciating the lives of youth. They form character as they 
direct and organize the experiences of these lives under 
social conditions. Children here, unconsciously, learn the 
greatest lesson the school can teach, how to live together. 
They learn to work together, to play together, to secure 
social harmony and cooperation. Morals is wholly a mat- 
ter of living harmoniously and helpfully with other lives. 
In this the school affords experience every day. Second, 
they are imparting, in the course of instruction, the ideals 
of life. This takes place not only in the study of heroes ^ 
and great deeds, but even more effectively in every item 
of instruction as it is given as an expression of the method 
of life, the law of life, the best way to do things. Third, 
pupils are under the direct influence of persons whom they 
tend to idealize whenever personal worth is evident.^ 

1 On a method of imparting spiritual ideals through biography see 
E. O. Sisson in " Religious Education," Vol. VI, p. 78-f, and F. C. 
Sharp in " Education for Character," Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1917. 

2 " We believe that the personality of the teacher and the general 
organization of the school are primary agents in the development 
of character," New York Conference, 1911. 



THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS 145 

Fourth, moral principles are directly taught in some 
schools and#incidentally in almost all. 

The schools are moral educators lacking moral con- 
sciousness. The very fact that we complain at not re- 
ceiving the moral product indicates social expectancy as 
to the schools. The school acknowledges the justice of 
the expectancy, but appears to be powerless to meet it. 
This is so because neither an ideal leadership nor an un- 
organized, and largely unrecognized, potency for social 
training will be sufficient to meet the very real and stern 
demands of these times. If socially-, morally-minded per- 
sons are to be the principal product of the school their 
development must be its principal purpose. We will not 
have personal effects in education until we set first the 
personal aim. 

The public school is not moral in that it does not have 
a moral aim. It is not yet a social institution. It is bom 
of society, supported by society. Its purpose is prepara- 
tion for living in society. But it is not organized as a 
society in order to give children real social experience. 
We have constructed a sound theory of social education ^ 
but we have applied it scarcely at all in our public schools. 

It is hardly necessary to suggest that the failure to 
apply the principles of social education involves failure 
to accomplish moral training, for social training and 
moral training are the same thing. The morality we de- 
sire is not that of isolated, individual perfection ; it is that 
of persons trained to live in society, to discharge their 
obligations to their fellows gladly and in love. We do 
not charge the schools with failure to produce unstained 
characters ; our charge is that they do not attempt the 
task they confess is theirs, to train lives for right social 
living. 

1 For example in Dewey, " The School and Society," Univ. of 
Chicago Press, rev. ed., 1917; S. Button, "Social Phases of Educa- 
tion," Macmillan, 1910; G. A. Coe, "A Social Theory of Religious 
Education," Scribners, 1917. 



146 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 



THE LACK OF MORAL PURPOSE 

Public educators have not designed the school courses 
for moral ends. The curriculum is a traditional bequest 
from the cultural ideals of the leisure class who once 
monopolized educational privileges. Where these ideals 
have been abandoned the changes that have been made 
have been for the purpose of training individuals to suc- 
cess in business. The curriculum, almost universally, has 
remained unaffected by the development of social think- 
ing; social principles which have become the founda- 
tions of modern educational theory have been ignored in 
its selection. Until in the curriculum there is evidence 
of a real consciousness of the actual facts of the child's 
life and the citizen's life we will find it hard to believe that 
the schools are organized for life purposes. These facts 
are not alone those of business ; they are not found alone 
in literary and mathematical activities ; they are the facts 
of social living, of daily contacts and of relationships 
with all other human beings. The great problem of life 
is not after all that of making a living ; for us all it is 
the problem of so determining the relationships of men 
that all problems of work and means of living are solved. 

Our schools are not moral, and therefore cannot have 
a moral effect because they are not supported hy public 
moral convictions. We parents do not send our children 
to school for any particular reason. Usually they are 
sent under a vague, general notion that " education is a 
good thing." We are taught that it gives every one a 
chance to get ahead in business. Public money often is 
spent in an immoral way, in the support of institutions 
which have no clearly understood public function in life. 
To consent to the use of public money either because 
schooling is the fashion or in the hope that it will boost 
my boy into a position of social superiority is to abuse 
a public trust. In a democracy public institutions must 



THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS 147 

exist for social ends. We need a new democratic con- 
science on public education. The schools constitute de- 
mocracy's great opportunity to train the youth of to-day 
for the life of to-morrow. To send a child to school is to 
take a significant step in committing him to public liv- 
ing ; it is the act by which the family consecrates the child 
to the life of democracy. It is a recognition that his life 
needs more than the family can give ; it needs the experi- 
ence of the larger public life; it needs training for de- 
mocracy by experience in a democratic social life. As 
they return to our homes we are solicitous about their 
lessons ; are we solicitous about their education in social 
life? Do we realize that the lessons are only incidental 
to the entire experience of school life.^ Are we willing to 
hold things in true proportion, to hold lessons to their 
contributory place and to see the entire school process 
in the perspective of training in and for democracy? 
We say that the schools exist to make good citizens, but 
we do not hold them to that purpose and judge them by 
that product. When we do we shall think of schooling 
primarily as a moral process and test it by moral re- 
sults. 

No matter how many formal systems of morality are 
taught schools do not become moral institutions until 
they train moral persons, who coming up into life take 
it all in terms of social responsibility, who are both 
desirous and competent to solve the problems of social 
adjustments. One may test a school by the attitude of 
its graduates to public interests, to slums and municipal 
vice, to tuberculosis, to labor problems, to neighbors and 
to other nations. 

Public schools mill he as good as public ideals. We 
must create a popular demand for a social product from 
our schools. We must test these institutions, no longer 
by whether our children have acquired certain facilities 
in memory exercises, nor by whether they have a brief, 



148 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

temporary and fading acquaintance with the classics, but 
by whether they are learning to live as social beings, 
whether they know the right, love truth, hate a lie and 
delight to follow the life of service, the pursuit of the 
good. We must demand efficient democrats. We begin 
to realize that while efficiency does mean ability to earn 
one's living, it must mean also ability to contribute to 
the whole of life and ability to be of service, ability to 
count for a better age. 

Any failure in the school is a social failure; it is a 
common, public responsibility. The real difficulty lies 
just here: the school is a public institution responsive 
to the public will. Its short-comings are largely inher- 
ent in democracy ; it is created by the people and admin- 
istered by the people. It is giving us what the people 
want. This would seem to indicate that a rigid adherence 
to the democratic principle would prevent any progress 
in the schools. But there are several saving considera- 
tions. First, democracy may mean improvement. Prog- 
ress depends on the principle that if a people can be 
moved to will their own elevation they will go much farther 
than they would under any sort of external power. Sec- 
ond, the people can be taught to desire better schools, and 
so to recognize the need for social training that they wdll 
insist on a moral product from the schools. 

Some of the best, practical improvements in public- 
school activities have been the results of campaigns to 
educate public opinion. The teachers wanted better meth- 
ods ; the principals agitated for them. But the changes 
were only effected when a Parents' Association, or some 
like organization, developed the public mind and when 
an aroused social opinion insisted on better things. 

The public is the real educator and the pttblic needs 
education. Evidently, then, an immediately practical 
step would be a program of the education of public opin- 
ion on the subject of democratic education. One of the 



THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS 149 

first steps will be to make the schools more truly public 
property. ,The customs of educational, professional se- 
crecy must be abandoned. Through the press, through 
school papers and through public gatherings at the school 
that familiarity with the school which we had in child- 
hood can be maintained and developed through life. Par- 
ents' Associations will help greatly. Leaders of public 
opinion may develop sane popular thinking and warm in- 
terest in the schools. It is just as much the duty of the 
church minister to preach on public education — pro- 
vided he really knows something about it — as it is his 
duty to preach on private righteousness. 

Public responsibility places all persons in a moral at- 
titude towards the schools. It is the moral duty of the 
people to understand the work of the schools. It is an 
immoral act to send children to an institution from which 
we expect moral training and not know whether that train- 
ing is being given or how it is being given. It is an im- 
moral act to be one of the owners of this social institu- 
tion and to remain in ignorance of its operations. Ig- 
norance regarding modern education is ignorance on 
social duty. It is strange that so many religious people 
to-day apparently are more concerned about how a few 
thousand people lived several thousand years ago than 
about how the millions of people of to-day are being pre- 
pared to live in to-morrow. 

It is the moral duty of the people to express their will 
regarding the schools. This they do not do to-day. The 
common system of the administration of public schools 
in the United States is an insult to education and a trav- 
esty on democracy. We elect, to conduct the affairs of 
the school, a board of people, who know no more about 
education than about anything else. This board is quite 
incapable of discharging the duties it assumes and usually 
unwilling to select a trained expert to whom the admin- 
istration might be committed. The failure of our schools 



150 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

in their moral product has been due, more than to any- 
thing besides, to our method of public control. The 
method has been immoral ; it has involved the acceptance 
of a social responsibility without any serious effort to 
discharge it. It has been imperfectly democratic. The 
public has lightheartedly laid its responsibility upon 
others without the least concern for their competency. 
Now we are demanding that the workers in the schools 
take more seriously their social responsibilities while we, 
the society which owns and conducts the schools, refuse 
to take our trusteeship seriously. 

Social responsibility involves obligation to the world*s 
future. We have a high religious duty toward public 
education. It lies not in the details of administration, 
not in insisting that this or the other specific internal re- 
form shall be immediately made, still less in exercising 
our freedom of general criticism. It lies in discharging 
in the spirit of full social responsibility our trusteeship 
for the lives of the young and for this public institution. 
That we can best do at this time by insisting that in this 
educational agency the science of education shall have free 
opportunity to effect the purposes of education. We are 
not all educators, but we are all trustees. We cannot 
administer, but we can insist that only those who are 
capable shall administer. We can take the school out 
of politics and set it in education. We can secure com- 
petent administrators and then give them freedom and 
responsibility. 

AWAKENING OF THE EDUCATIONAL CONSCIENCE 

Educational administration, backed up by public opin- 
ion, will make possible a tremendous step toward social 
efficiency, that is, toward securing the desired moral prod- 
uct from the schools. This is the case because, First, the 
trained educators are the very ones who realize the essen- 
tially spiritual character of education and its social, 



THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS 151 

moral aim. They have been trained in the science of 
education. They have seen it as a social process. They 
are the ones who have most openly and fully expressed 
their conviction as to the moral aim.^ Second, they alone 
are capable of directing the necessary reorganization un- 
der the acceptance of the new ideals. This is an educa- 
tional problem calling for the most exact scientific knowl- 
edge and the widest experience. Third, trained educa- 
tional administration under freedom will secure the de- 
sired moral results because these results can flow only 
from a thoroughgoing application of the principles of 
education. 

The last mentioned consideration is so important that 
it deserves more than a passing mention. When we criti- 
cize the schools for failure to train in moral living we are 
simply stating their educational failure. Education which 
does not develop the powers of living in social relations 
is not education, for the development of those powers is 
both the process and the purpose of education. We are 
not demanding that the schools take up some new duty ; 
we are only asking that they fully discharge that which 
they already have. Education is for purposes of social 
training ; it must have a moral product in lives habituated, 
motivated and efficient to live with other lives and to ren- 
der to the world the service of full living. This is all we 
are asking. It will be secured when we give the educa- 
tional process free course to work in the schools. 

We can only, after all, lay at our own doors, we the 
public, the blame for the failure of the schools. They 

1 See the Declaration of the Conference on Moral Education, 
conducted by The Religious Education Association at Teachers 
College, New York : " We . . . believe that the moral aim, i.e., the 
formation of character, should be treated as fundamental in all 
education; that morality has a positive as well as a negative content; 
that the former should receive primary emphasis; that it consists, 
in one aspect, of promotion of the common good, in another, of 
the attainment of individual character." See the complete statement 
in Religious Education for April, 1911, pp. 117, 118. 



152 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

are what we will them to be. We prate like idle children 
when we complain of moral inadequacy so long as we 
evade our own moral responsibility toward these our own 
institutions. 

WHAT IS MORAL EDUCATION? 

Undoubtedly the situation would be simplified if we 
were entirely in the light as to what is meant by moral 
education. If we mean enriching the student's knowl- 
edge of ethics, then it is necessary only to organize the 
material on the historical development of moral princi- 
ples and to present this together with a philosophical 
analysis of moral conduct and its principles. But surely 
this is not our aim. Moral education is something very 
different from and vastly more important and practical 
than instruction in morals. " Moral education " is es- 
sentially a misleading phrase ; it implies the notion that 
there is a department of human interest or abilities which 
may be regarded separately and which we call " morals." 
It carries the implication that the desired end would be 
attained by special topics in the curriculum, by adding 
courses in morality. This concept has led to the prac- 
tice of arranging lessons on the different so-called virtues, 
conducting drills on selected moral maxims and attempt- 
ing moral education by instruction in morals. It assumes 
that an intellectual analysis is the same thing as a vital 
experience. But the aim in education is not an expert 
on morality but an expert in morality, one who is capable 
habitually of the moral life. As in the phrase " religious 
education " so in " moral education " the adjective is 
descriptive, indicating the aim and quality of the educa- 
tional process. That aim, which determines the process, 
is that through the experience of all schooling youth 
should be habituated to full competency to social living. 
Moral education means education directed consciously to- 



THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS 153 

ward a society of righteousness, a brotherhood of good- 
will, a demycracy of love and goodness and well-being. 

At all events what we as parents desire from the schools, 
that which as citizens we seek, is that education shall count 
for moral character. We desire boys and girls who love 
truth and honor more than aught else of their own, and 
their fellowmen more than anything that is their own. 
We would have our children grow up to hate a lie, to 
loathe all meanness, to honor all truth and greatness, 
to cultivate the things that are good, to seek out high 
thoughts, to give their lives to noble, unselfish ends, and 
unreservedly to live for the common happiness and good. 
We seek spiritual democrats. We desire the schools to 
help us to this end ; we expect the schools, in a word, to 
teach children how to live and to teach them this great 
inclusive subject, so that they will naturally, habitually 
work out strong and fair lives for themselves and a better, 
finer, sweeter society for all. The aim turns us back not 
so much to any special subject as to the need for a social 
consciousness that will dominate all subjects. 

The primacy of the moral aim should make it dom- 
inant in the curriculum. It will be said that the school 
curriculum is overcrowded already. Then it is time to 
take stock and see what had best be thrown out. Take 
first things first ; if conduct is the largest thing in life, 
let conduct become the guiding principle in the curriculum ; 
then all things can come in the order of their merit for this 
actual social life of ours. Our present curricula are de- 
termined by a process which has for decades introduced 
new subjects and never shown an old one to the door. 
They have become more and more crowded, until all a 
teacher can do is to hurl the bare bones at a class. Why, 
for example, should the school attempt to exhaust life's 
knowledge of the classics of English literature.'^ Why 
not be satisfied to start a habit? Life leaves much time 



154 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

for learning; the schools can leave some facts unknown. 
Really to teach the art of right living will mean the 
abandonment of the factory method of pedagogy by mass- 
drills, giving teachers smaller classes, choosing teachers 
for their powers of leadership, not for their cheapness; 
paying more in taxes for this supreme task ; abandoning 
our follies, our weak pride over traditional trifles and 
putting life before everything else in the curriculum. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE SCHOOLS AND MOEAL TRAINING 

The society of to-morrow is in the school of to-day. 
Democracy invests in the education of youth to-day be- 
cause it believes it is possible to determine, through them, 
the character of to-morrow. 

The possibility of realizing democracy depends on the 
training of the young in its habits and ideals. As a spe- 
cial type of society democracy demands special types of 
education in order to secure preparation for its special 
form of social living. Therefore, education for democ- 
racy is social training specifically directed toward certain 
qualities and characteristics. The tests of democratic 
education pass beyond the intellectual to the moral. We 
look for certain kinds of persons from the schools. 

Once we sought to make youth good by repression. In 
fact the only good child, of whose goodness we could feel 
assured, was the one safely laid away in the church-yard. 
Now we believe that the duty of society is to stimulate 
the child to express his whole life normally. Instead of 
lamenting that there are no good children we subscribe 
to the doctrine that there are no bad ones. Faith in nat- 
ural depravity has waned and faith in growing lives takes 
its place. Education emphasizes development rather than 
discipline. It sees in children not only the society of 
the future time, but society in the future tense, further 
along on the road toward realized ideals. We no longer 
seek to force young lives into the set molds of our present 
ways, ways that we know to be but sad compromises, after 
all. Rather we would face them forward ; we would stim- 
ulate them to self-realization. We do not know what they 

155 



156 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

may yet attain to, but this we do know, that above all 
besides, we crave for them riches and power in the realm 
of character. 

Changing times call for changed methods. In a rela- 
tively simple order of society the functions of the schools 
«eem to be simple and easily discharged. The experience 
of the students is comparatively uniform; their relations 
are simple and the demands of society upon them are 
easily met. But when we face our modern congested life, 
with its cosmopolitan character, its complexities of liv- 
ing, its temptations and varieties of possibilities, it is 
obvious that the schools have new problems. City living 
frequently involves the loss of home consciousness and the 
decay of neighborliness with its power to mold lives ; 
it brings a multiplicity of distractions and a new variety 
in types of living. Add to this the industrial situation, 
the demands on youth to early exclusive application to 
toil, the infinite variety of possible tasks, the moral strain 
of the current conflict between diff^erent orders of work- 
ers and between employer and employee, and it is evi- 
dent that the old simple type of neighborly school will 
not meet the need of the present day. 

Our *' general culture " has failed. We have expected 
to meet the need of increasingly complex social living in 
two ways. First, by dependence on compulsory general 
education. We said. Give every child all the cultural ad- 
vantages and knowledge discipline that belongs to a 
gentleman and you will make gentlemen of all. We, there- 
fore, selected a wide, inclusive curriculum designed to be 
applied by a factory process which passed the child 
through the stages of a knowledge mill, the elements be- 
ing determined by the traditional requirements of the gen- 
tleman. We forgot that the knowledge processes were 
only incidental to the making of the gentleman, that the 
informational elements in the training of the favored son, 
of a few generations ago, were only a small fraction of 



THE SCHOOLS AND MORAL TRAINING 157 

that whole course of life, that total environment which 
molded all* his thoughts and habituated his whole life. 
The aim was right, to make every youth a gentleman, 
that is one who took life in terms of obligation and who, 
preparing himself for the life of usefulness, learned to 
live in gentleness, goodwill, social harmony and efficiency. 
But we centered attention on the gentleman's head and 
forgot his hands and his heart. How signally the infor- 
mational process has failed to make gentlemen in this 
sense of efficient social factors must be evident when we 
remember that juvenile criminality is not less prevalent 
among our American school graduates than amongst for- 
eigners, that the personal factors in our severest polit- 
ical problems are graduates of our schools and that, 
popular indifference to honesty of action, integrity of 
word, civic honor and domestic purity is accompanied by 
growing general intelligence. 

Our vocational training has been divorced from the 
greater realities of life. Second, we have sought to meet 
the demands of an increasingly complex civilization by 
vocational training. This is a wise recognition of obliga- 
tions of service to society, of the moral obligation of every 
one to do his work and to do it well. We can scarcely 
over-estimate the values of vocational training. Its dan- 
ger lies either in a narrow emphasis or in a wrong aim. 
Popular emphasis is distinctly industrial, trying to make 
full men by making efficient hands. Vocational training 
can easily mean the exploitation of youth for the sake 
of factories and dividends. The aim is wrong, too, when 
vocational training means emphasis on technical abilities 
as ends in themselves. It is of value only as it seeks to 
develop persons in efficiency to do their best work in the 
world. 

Moral education remains a problem because it has never 
been attempted in any large and comprehensive manner 
during modem times. The educational world is afraid 



158 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

of it because of its apparent indefiniteness. It cannot be 
counted and it is intangible ; what place could it have in 
this age of corporeal realities? The educator who is 
up-to-date must be a man of business, " practical," iron- 
minded. If, under the pressure of the public will, he 
recognizes moral education, it becomes a segregated part 
of his mechanical scheme of things. His mind is fixed 
on its schedules, texts and tests. 

MORAL. TRAINING NOT YET TRIED 

Moral education has never had a real trial in our mod- 
ern schools. Almost all the practice that has come under 
that name has been no more than instruction in ethics or 
lessons on moral concepts and ideals. Educational in- 
stitutions have been offering courses of studies on morals 
instead of training and adjusting pupils as moral per- 
sons. There are numerous text-books on the virtues, de- 
scribing, analyzing and usually disintegrating them ; there 
are numerous syllabi classifying the virtues, directing and 
planning just when Truthfulness, Justice, Honesty, and 
Helpfulness shall be taught, but scarcely one comprehen- 
sive outline of education as a moral process for moral 
persons. With all these schemes it might well be supposed 
that children would come from many schools as familiar 
with the virtues as with the mountains, rivers, capes and 
bays of their own country and, also, that, just as these 
latter are but names until encountered in experience, so 
might the virtues lack all significance and reality. Fur- 
ther, just as the school geography becomes but an insuffi- 
cient and, often, a dangerous guide to a man lost amongst 
the very mountains he memorized in youth, so mere nom- 
inal familiarity with the topography of the realm of vir- 
tue would be valueless to those who seek to make their 
way therein. 

Moral training has been hindered by pedagogical mech- 
anisms. The multiplication of devices to teach things 



THE SCHOOLS AND MORAL TRAINING 159 

about morals is probably due to the natural demand for 
the easiest ^ay of doing things. It is part of the tend- 
ency toward routine. The teacher who is confronted with 
the. broad and appalling task of the adequate education 
of a number of persons as moral beings, will welcome the 
conveniently arranged syllabus which relieves him of so 
much anxious thought and makes the task of moral edu- 
cation as simple as a drill in arithmetic. Such devices 
tend, however, to keep teachers satisfied with blind obedi- 
ence to schedules; they move around in sawdust circuits 
and offer pretenses of education ; they become blind to 
the breath and dignity of their real tasks. They cannot 
afford leadership and their dismal efforts have only dis- 
credited moral education. 

Disintegrating moral character. It will mean a seri- 
ous set-back to educational progress if we yield to the 
notion that moral education is a separable part of educa- 
tion, that it can be segregated, departmentalized and made 
the duty of a specialist, so that any others would have no 
responsibility in regard thereto. This is the fatally fac- 
ile method of settling the moral problem : push it into 
a pigeonhole, appropriately labeled, and place some one 
in charge of it. If " Morals " becomes a separate study 
in the school that separation is the most impressive les- 
son we can possibly give as to its unreality. If you can 
separate your morals from your mathematics then in later 
years you can separate your morals from your money 
making. So many now are able to keep their ethical con- 
ceptions in sealed packages where there is no danger of 
their escaping into life because they received them in that 
form, as a pedagogical pack. 

The familiarity with the virtues which comes from 
habitually analyzing them breeds only contempt, of them. 
A lesson in which motives are threshed down to the dust 
and ethical situations studied as one dissects a flower may 
easily breed prigs who know all about the virtues but 



160 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

are innocent of entertaining any of them. There is no 
virtue in a memorized catalogue of virtues any more than 
there is any religion in a series of scriptural passages. 
Here we meet the old fallacy of substituting the symbol 
for the experience, imagining that a child grasps com- 
parative values because he throws his head back and 
sings that " two times two are four." He does not use 
the formula when he meets the experience; and he does 
not carefully repeat " Honesty is the best policy " when 
he sees his neighbor's peach within reach. Indeed, in the 
instance of this maxim, he might be even less moral if 
he repeated it and were controlled by the statement. 

Now this does not mean that there is no value in the 
direct teaching of ethics, but that (1) no systematized 
scheme of teaching virtues or goodnesses will ever make 
good men or train them in virtuous lives, (2) that immoral 
results are likely to come from separating morals into 
special courses, special teachers and departments, and 
(3) that moral education must be the aim of the whole 
school, dominating every teacher, guiding every course 
and touching all the pupil's life. 

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN DEFINITIONS AND DEEDS 

The natural objection raised just here is, "You are 
throwing us back into chaos just when we are working 
out a system." Alas, the fallacy of systems ! They are 
the good that fights the best ; they are the means at which 
men rest content instead of going on to their ends. The 
system and the syllabus are the teacher's guides and never 
the pupil's goal. They are a good deal like railroad time- 
tables, something one can go by but not go on or in. 
Present practice in moral education faces the danger of 
mistaking the time-table for the journey. It is a good 
thing to work out syllabi ; they should aid teachers par- 
ticularly in recognizing the moral significances of current 
lessons and in determining varying emphases on moral 






MM 






THE SCHOOLS AND MORAL TRAINING 161 

meanings according to the life-development of each pupil. 
Further, they will have value as the social and introspec- 
tive powers develop ; in the years from sixteen on youth 
can often discuss ethics without prejudice to moral con- 
duct. But, as means of education, they defeat the moral 
purpose by substituting discussions for deeds and anal- 
ysis for activity. 

There may be a capital difference between teaching 
morals and moral training. Our emphasis on the task of 
character development will be a disappointment to the 
methodologists who are concerned only with the content 
of the curriculum. We are more concerned with the ef- 
fect, and that brings into consideration all the causes 
which will produce the desired effect. We need often to 
remind ourselves of the perfectly obvious fact that lessons 
about morals have no special power to make moral people. 
The analysis of the virtues is not a virtuous act and mem- 
ory catalogues of moral attributes could be the mental 
possession of an immoral life. Some excellent definitions 
of morality have come from poor demonstrators. In 
other words, the task is not to be accomplished by courses 
in ethics. These may have some advantages especially in 
developing a certain needed awareness of moral situations 
and their possibilities. But even that has its dangers in 
developing undue consciousness of action. 

Because the democratic life is a moral experience train- 
ing for that life must include the essential elements of that 
moral experience. We are beginning to realize that so- 
cial living is a moral experience, that it makes tremendous 
demands on the moral life and that the single great and 
appalling deficiency of present plans of education lies in 
neglect to train that life. Therefore we see a quickened 
and spreading interest in what is called moral education. 
But there is little hope that we shall accomplish any- 
thing worth while so long as w^e go on playing the old 
tricks over with new variations. We have been unwilling 



162 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

to think our problem out. We are demanding new 
courses in morals, new " codes of morality," new sets of 
commandments, new syllabi for the guidance of teachers. 
We hear of prizes offered for " codes of morality " as 
though the great need was that of defining right con- 
duct, as though the world had just discovered morality 
and needed to have it digested and codified. Shades of 
Aristotle 1 Why add to the o'er-topping mountains of 
definitions.'^ A feeling of sadness at the futility of it all 
comes over one when the long lines of books on ethics are 
surveyed. Is it sloth or is it blindness that leads us on, 
generation after generation, following the faith that de- 
fining a virtue is the way to obtaining it, hoping that 
courses on disintegrated virtues would give us the power 
of the virtuous life.'' -^ 

There is only one pathway here ; it is the same as that 
followed by educational science in all other departments 
and phases of life, the pathway of directed experience. 
The abilities come only through their exercise and dis- 
cipline. School-training will have moral effects in the 
degree that it is recognized by those who train as con- 
stituting steadily a series of moral situations. It will 
train for the life of democracy as it practices democracy 
in the social relationships of the school group, the rela- 
tionships between all the members of the society composed 
of pupils, teachers, supervisors, principals, board and 
other officers. 

Perhaps the problem is difficult because it is so very 
simple. It would help if we were to forget all our dis- 
cussions and seek to state simply just what we expect, 
particularly from the schools, as to moral effects. Is it 
not this, that our boys and girls acquire right social con- 
duct .f' Supposing, for the sake of simplicity, the prob- 
lem is transferred to another and more limited sphere ; 

1 See " Virtue and the Virtues " by Gep. A. Coe, in Religious Edv/- 
cation for Jan., 1912, Vol. VI, No. 6. 



THE SCHOOLS AND MORAL TRAINING 163 

what would we do if we desired right musical conduct? 
The expression is not very exact ; but let it pass for the 
sake of illustration. Modern methods in teaching music 
comprise at least these elements : creative action, constant 
repetition, discovery of meaning, development of judg- 
ment, taste and discrimination, introduction to ideal lead- 
ers and their work, the development of feeling and senti- 
ment. The process seems to be first action, then defini- 
tion and illumination and then idealization, action con- 
tinuing through and giving reality to all and securing 
the development of powers. The process results in abil- 
ities, habits and tendencies. Now the desirable results 
in moral training might be stated in quite similar terms, 
provided the experience be considered as a social one. 

The largest leverage in social, moral training is the 
control of conduct. It must be control of behavior, not 
control of mechanism. The principal element in moral 
training is action, action repeated, action more and more 
easily willed until it becomes involuntary. Actions make 
character ; they determine ideals and they interpret ideals. 
They create ideals for others. The school not only can 
control social action but it must do so if it is to carry 
on its ordinary work. It establishes standards of action 
and thus sets up ideals. It demands adherence to those 
standards and thus it develops habits. But often it has 
been thinking of these regulations of conduct purely from 
the disciplinary point of view, with regard to their rela- 
tion to the mechanisms of class-rooms and teaching. It 
is still, apparently, commonly unaware that such controls 
of conduct are teaching. The behavior of children is 
really determined in three like ways : through directed 
action in the learning institution, the school, through 
imitative action in the nurtural institution, the home, and 
through free, social action in the playing group. 

For moral purposes conduct must he creative. This 
means not simply making things but planning and realiz- 



164 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

ing purposes through chosen organizations and activities. 
This implies two elements, ideal enterprises and democratic 
self-control. Surely it is sufficient to suggest the value 
of these two elements in developing moral character. In- 
creasingly the young must realize the school, not as an 
imposed institution, but as a social enterprise in which 
they all have a share. This can come about only as spe- 
cial enterprises are developed, as they pass into student 
initiative and as they all merge into a general sense of the 
school as a social enterprise. This process develops pow- 
ers of control and makes it possible to throw increasingly 
responsibility for school life, " government " in a wise 
sense, on the members of this society, the students. 

Certainly experience of this kind is necessary in prepa- 
ration for citizenship. As it is, the child on leaving school 
is suddenly thrust from a condition of abject tutelage into 
one of unlimited personal freedom. He has had no train- 
ing in controls, no experience in self-direction as a mem- 
ber of a free group. Little wonder that we have juvenile 
delinquency when we have these lads and lasses plunged 
into life with no schooling for life. Some steps have been 
taken to meet this need by the organization in the class 
rooms of model cities and junior republics. The purpose 
is good ; but the plan does not meet the need. The pu- 
pils need self-direction in the normal activities of school 
life. Their training for moral living must be by experi- 
ence in the morals, the social relationships and duties 
of the school life itself, for this is their real world. 

Ethics rise out of moral experience. Given the ex- 
perience of right action its meaning usually takes care 
of itself. Whatever definitions may be necessary should 
follow the deeds. But definitions are seldom necessary. 
No good fables need a tag. There comes the time, in the 
high-school years, when youth asks its questions about 
conduct. The desire to analyze situations may be 
indulged where the situations hav^ gone before. Then 



THE SCHOOLS AND MORAL TRAINING 165 

moral training is possible through the discussion of life's 
real situations. For example, let high-school people dis- 
cuss their possible occupations, let them discuss the voca- 
tions and then go on to discuss training for them. These 
elements are parts of real experience. They would lead 
to the discussion of the ethical situations involved. It 
would be a simple matter to develop a series of useful 
discussions on the choice of life work and on the social 
functions and ethical standards of different occupations 
and professions. 

Idealization is the dynamic of moral conduct. There 
is no moral situation concerning which the school cannot 
reveal controlling ideals. They are presented in varied 
forms, through persons, their actions, social situations 
and movements, and moral sentiments or ideals. They 
appeal to youth's faith in life, that one can make of it 
what he will. He believes in heroic determination. The 
splendor of heroic character makes its alluring appeal. 
While not so immediately determinative of action as are 
social habits and incentives it serves to color and often 
govern action under social stimulus. It sustains good 
habits and helps to inhibit bad ones. It is difficult to 
imagine any person with a consciousness of life teaching 
in a public school and avoiding the revelation of life's 
ideals in heroic persons and inspiring situations. History 
is a dry category of dull facts without them. If " history 
is philosophy teaching by example " the examples are 
commonly wonderfully inspiring. Through history and 
literature the door is wide open to ideals in persons, his- 
torical and fictitious. But the door is open also in all 
the sciences. Huxley, Darwin, Newton, Kepler, Galileo, 
Wallace, were far from being saints, but their lives preach 
devotion to ideals, heroism, courage and initiative. Each 
in their own specialty is part of the child's scientific 
heritage. How can one teach mathematics and ignore 
Newton and Kepler or, if the teacher were really human, 



166 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

fail to open a door into the mind of Lewis Carroll? If 
he was truly a mathematician he would find those spiritual 
worths that Prof. Keyser has uncovered for us all.^ And 
in like manner with all the fields of knowledge, they cluster 
about great persons, souls worthy to lead our youth to 
greatness, men and women whom they can well idealize. 

There is a tendency to discount the value of sentiments. 
But one thing is clear, that all persons who think of life 
objectively cherish some high forms of sentiment, of ideals 
set in literary beauty. Literary moral maxims have of 
themselves as much value as table manners. They must 
be part of something else, part of their setting and, in 
some measure, part of experience. They become sources 
of inspiration, they sustain when opposition presses hard, 
they guide in doubt, they give us choice vehicles to convey 
encouragement to others. Everything depends on their 
reality. They cannot be given to a class by an excursion 
through " Gems of Literature," nor by means of an 
encyclopaedia of quotations, nor by the old copy-book 
method. They are discovered as part of the experience 
of knowing life through literature, history and the 
sciences. Where the first is taught we learn to read 
souls, the souls of individuals and of peoples and then 
there flashes out here and there the shining hope and 
idealism of these souls. We catch the gleam and hide 
it in our own souls. That is not a process that can be 
precisely directed. It does not stand alone. It comes 
only when there is good teaching, only when one life 
leads other lives. 

There is nothing new, nothing added to the curriculum 
in what has been suggested here. There is no need of 
adding anything; the great need is that of interpreting 
all in terms of conduct. Before we attempt to add 
another subject called " Morals," would it not be well to 

1 See his illuminating discussion of The Spiritual Significance of 
Mathematics in Religious Education, April, 1911, p. 384. 



THE SCHOOLS AND MORAL TRAINING 167 

see what can be accomplished by really using, for the ends 
of conduct, J;he means now at our disposal? 

Once to see clearly that the aim of the school is to 
train persons in competent social living, and to set the 
school free for that purpose, is to convert the entire 
school process to moral ends. A school governed by such 
a purpose would saturate community life and create the 
environment favorable to its own plans and cooperating 
with its program. 



CHAPTER XIII 

SPIRITUAL VALUES IN SCHOOL STUDIES 

Granted that the primary purpose of the school is a 
moral one, what relation do the common studies hold to 
this purpose? 

The answer would be very simple if the moral aim 
implied only instruction about morals, but, since it involves 
a program of the development of social character, vari- 
eties of relations appear at every point. Any subject 
is related to the moral aim of the school in the degree 
that it affects the student's social attitude and habits. 
The test of the values of studies, for the moral-social 
purposes, lies in questions such as these : What interpre- 
tations of conduct and life do they present? What ideals 
do they help to create? What motives do they stimulate? 
What social experience do they afford? In what ways 
do they stimulate feeling toward worthy purposes? In 
a word, we ask. In what ways do the general studies 
constitute spiritual experiences? 

Morality is religion applied to conduct, that is, it is 
the issue in behavior of our view of social relations and 
the meaning and value of life. It is the work that results 
from a faith. All moral training rests on some sort of 
an idealizing basis. It is a basis formed in whatever 
constitutes or offers a spiritual experience, a quickening 
of the feelings of joy and confidence toward life, an eleva- 
tion of ideals and deepening of meanings. The schools 
cannot teach sectarian religious facts but they can and 
do offer this basis of the spiritual. They minister in 

many ways to the child's spiritual nature. The reality 

168 



SPIRITUAL VALUES IN SCHOOL STUDIES 169 

and power of that ministry is the measure of their moral 
value. ^ 

VALUES IN CIVICS 

Courses dealing with practical living peculiarly in- 
volve spiritual experiences. Civics is an instance. It 
is the science of social organization by political means ; 
therefore it involves social relations and duties. In a 
democracy it is a subject peculiarly rich for it must 
study the social mechanisms by which democracy realizes 
its spiritual purpose of the growth of social persons and 
the development of society. The teacher of vision makes 
it mean vastly more than the mechanics of government ; 
it passes over into a study of persons in their relations 
for a common welfare. It emphasizes the importance 
of political organization as affecting the well-being of 
people. It studies relative standards of well-being and 
so must involve questions of spiritual values. So taught, 
the subject becomes intensely human. It is no longer a 
matter of collecting taxes and administering justice but 
a study of how a free people live together and effect their 
ideals for the common good. It is evidently a moral 
subject since it must consider social conduct and, as it 
enlarges into a vision of a common human brotherhood 
it becomes really religious. Civics rightly taught is 
simply the teaching of social morality on the wide scale 
of total social interests. 

But even larger moral values are possible; this subject 
affords opportunity to apply the principle that teaching 
is the direction and organization of experience. Classes 
are easily led to actually work on the problems of social 
living; specific situations with which all are familiar in 
the community become the objects of practical service. 
A group of boys and girls discussing sanitation in their 
neighborhood will discover more than the facts revealed 
by a survey; they will find opportunities for usefulness; 



170 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

they will form ideals and concepts of duty. They will 
practice moral living and, in the experience, find its spir- 
itual significance. 

Still this may seem to be remote from religious teaching. 
Of course, objectively the matter is clear; all teaching 
of the art of social living is teaching the practice of 
religion. But we could make a like claim for whatever 
relates to conduct in any form. What more, then, is 
needed? The motivation of conduct with religious sanc- 
tions and ideals. And these are precisely the results that 
flow, for example, from teaching civics under the demo- 
cratic concept in any adequate fashion. For the demo- 
cratic ideal is a social method based on spiritual ideals ; 
it is the expression of the principle for which Jesus lived, 
that each life was each man's chance to help the world 
to larger life. Democracy, studied in the concrete as 
presented in civics, reveals a social situation possible only 
as all men learn the way of common service. Thus a 
definite purpose toward a life of service is established in 
the pupil's mind. 

The search for an ideal civic life establishes certain 
habits of the religious mind ; it is a search for a practical, 
common, social goodwill; it is an attempt to organize 
all our varying interests in a common good. It reaches 
after the experience of a common brotherhood. The 
ideals involved may not be entirely clear to the student's 
mind, but the important thing is not so much to identify / 
religious ideals as to establish the habits that express 
them. 

The social emphasis in religion has forced the churches 
into civic interests ; it has compelled them to work for 
better civic conditions ; surely whatever helps youth to 
a better social spirit, through the understanding of civics, 
must be a direct contribution to the common ends which 
the churches and schools have together in an ideal society.-^ 

1 Some of these ideals are stated in such text-books as, Ward & 



SPIRITUAL VALUES IN SCHOOL STUDIES 171 



PHILOSOPHY TEACHING BY EXAMPLE 

History. Many a teacher wishes, in view of the con- 
duct of youth, that time might be given to courses in 
the art of life. Yet often these teachers turn, with 
weariness of spirit to their work in the greatest of all 
courses, that record of man's endeavor to learn the art 
of life which we call history. The very people who 
attempt to teach right living by means of Hebrew history 
on Sunday often are blind to the spiritual values in other 
history. This is not so much because of any artificial 
division between sacred and secular history as because 
they have never seen how either Hebrew or early Christian 
history really count for life and society to-day. When 
that is once realized all consciousness of essential differ- 
ences is swept away. All history has two characteristics : i 
it is objectively " philosophy teaching by example," and, ; 
subjectively, for the student it is his projection into the 
race experience of learning the art of social living. 

For the young history is mediated through persons, 
through great lives. Necessarily it lacks synthesis ; it 
is polarized about great persons. They become leaders, 
ideals, revelators of ways of life. The young delight in 
them. Study may become a social experience of being 
with these exalted ones. Let no one object that such 
idealization is the foe of scientific accuracy. The danger 
lies in the other direction, that we shall imagine we are 
scientific when we have gathered up only the surface facts, 
the spatial details of the lives of persons and the move- 
ments of affairs. Scientific completeness demands more ; 
it demands that which lives crave, to know the feelings 
of men, to see their motives and measure their influence ; 
it must include the facts of the spirit. History cannot 
be taught unless the pupil is led to see the forces within ' 

Edwards, " Christianizing; Community Life " (Associated Press) ; H. 
K. Rowe, "Society, Its Origin and Development" (Scribners). 



17^ EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

men. But to make a boy the worshiper of a worthy 
hero and one justly appreciated for his inner life is to 
give the worshiping life stimuli in the right direction. 
To establish the pupil's will toward ideal lives is to make 
history real, vital and effective. It is to gather up the 
flood of the life of the past for the forward movement of 
present lives. 

The light of personalized ideals is organized by the 
pupil, if he is wisely directed, into a moral consciousness 
in history. He thinks, no longer of individuals alone, but 
of groups, of persons in social relations, of the effect of 
lives on other lives, of the consequences of actions on 
the well-being of all. Without moralizing the teacher 
who sees these significances can help the pupil to discover 
them. Then the pupil enters sympathetically into the 
process which history records, man's endeavor for right 
and full life. 

But the essential contribution is that which has been 
only hinted at, the study of history may be a social 
experience. The ideal personages, the thrilling causes, 
the splendid situations, when youth's imagination touches 
them, pass from the past and the pages of books into 
living, present realities. The student feels himself in the 
moving throng of other days ; he shares their feelings ; his 
muscles quiver to act with them; he enlarges his area of 
social experience as he idealizes it. Then the skillful 
teacher directs and develops this social experience through 
dramatics and pageantry, intensifies its reality, and clari- 
fies its accuracy through wider study. There are those 
to whom heroes are very real for they have walked with 
them and learned of them. 

THE SOUL AND SOCIETY IN LITERATURE 

Literature. Here we stand on very familiar and oft- 
trodden ground. Few have thought with any care regard- 
ing the work of the schools without realizing that while 



SPIRITUAL VALUES IN SCHOOL STUDIES 173 

the study of literature marks its high point of spiritual 
possibilities^ it is also its low tide of pedagogical and 
social efficiency. English is the one required course prac- 
tically all through the high school and it is the one 
toward which the students most unanimously have an 
emphatic aversion. It is the bete noir to all save the few 
who manage to get be3^ond the mechanics of teaching and 
discover joy for themselves in the material studied. The 
reasons are very simple : First, they do not study English 
Literature ; they study things about it, its history, 
language forms and its creators. They are drilled in 
descriptions and dissections ; they are invited to admire 
that which they are required to analyze, an impossible 
combination. Second, the logical processes are inverted ; 
the teacher expects love for literature to grow out of its 
facts ; on the contrary, a desire for the facts would grow 
out of the love quickened through an experience of 
literature. The interest in an author's life follows a 
long acquaintance wuth his work. We have been pur- 
suing wrong ends, developing literary critics. We have 
constructed courses for the high school in the anatomy of 
literature, for the college in its pathology, as though we 
were training its physicians. And when the lower schools 
would fain respond to the student's hunger for the joys 
of literature they find themselves hampered by the college- 
entrance requirements. 

The tragedy of it all lies in the fact that the lower 
schools are using the years when youth's tastes are being 
determined not only in failing to quicken literary appre- 
ciation but in developing positive aversions. It is not 
strange that the people prefer the tawdry magazine and 
the defiling newsprint when they have been told that the 
path to real literature lies through the desert of dry 
facts, through the wearying analyses and the dust of 
the specialist's workshop. 

^ut for the purposes pf democracy the most significant 



174 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

values lie in the peculiarly vital social experiences that 
are involved in the love of literature. No one can enjoy 
a worthy book alone, for the enjoyment is pleasure born 
of the contact with another spirit and commonly involves 
^ idealized contacts with the beings created by the author. 
Literature is an open door into fellowship with all the 
great, with those who have actually lived in the flesh and 
those who have been born of the imagination. They wait 
to walk with us. That which society has stored for our 
enriching becomes easily and immediately ours. Such 
communion and stimulus is only one side of social fellow- 
ship, but it is a most valuable side. Young lives 
especially need the stimulus of wiser minds and richer 
hearts ; they have a right to the leadership of the great ; 
they have a right to belong, not only to the society of 
the passing hour, but to the fellowship of all time, and to 
know its joy and strength. 

Literature is the means by which the democracy of the 
spirit is open to all; it is the means by which we have 
communion with the soul of all. This is its vital spirit. 
Here " spirit to spirit may speak." 

Here lies surely one of the large spiritual oppor- 
tunities of the school. If we could but hold clear the 
distinction between the letter and the life I Literature is 
a spirit of life which takes form in letters ; it does not 
consist in them, it only uses them as a means of revelation 
and communication. To know its ways is to enter the 
society of all those who have enriched the world with 
enduring thoughts, to hear the songs of those who have 
given us new heart, to catch the vision of those who have 
not been afraid of light, to grasp the hands of those who 
have not feared to walk alone, in mist or fog, in face 
of foe or doubts. It is to enlarge one's personal world. 
It is to have the power of banishing the rattling street 
and drawing within the magic circle of the evening lamp 
the calm face of Socrates, the sparkling eyes of Cellini, 



SPIRITUAL VALUES IN SCHOOL STUDIES 175 

the saturnine grin of Cervantes, the cynical smile of 
Carlyle, tlje human sympathy of Browning, Dickens, 
Thackeraj^ Mrs. Gaskell — time fails to tell the innumer- 
able company that wait our silent invitation. 

Such a society is very real. Habituation in its ways 
develops familiarity with its ideals, its language and its 
customs. The love of good literature is a high social 
experience and no one knows how to read a worthy book 
until the worth sought is just this contact with persons, 
wdth them in a degree that grows in reality and intimacy 
until the page seems to fade and the spiritual becomes 
the only reality. 'Not only is such experience possible 
to youth ; it is their right ; it is our social necessity. 

All this involves the conversion of the teaching of 
literature into an experience in literature. Surely this 
is precisely what we are doing with all school studies ; they 
pass from descriptions about facts to the facts them- 
selves as life realities. 

Those who are sighing for an opportunity to teach the 
Bible in the public schools have overlooked the fact that 
a thorough acquaintance with the masterpieces of English 
prose and poetry of the last three centuries would either 
give directly or would lead to all the biblical knowledge 
that would be definitely useful to their lives. ^ This does 
not imply that direct study is without value, but surely 
the values of biblical material do not depend on whether 
they are found in books or bound in limp leather. 

Language studies have their spiritual values, not only 
as the doors into literatures and the means of enriching 
the significance of our own literature, but as revelators 
of the inner lives of other peoples. They bring close to 
us those who are separated by language. They break 
down our prejudices and broaden our sympathies and 
appreciations. Race prejudices are possible only in 

1 See, e.g., the many works on Browning, also such books as " The 
Bible in Shakespeare," W. A. Burgess. 



176 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

ignorance of the spiritual life of other peoples. Our 
derisive phrases shame us when we know their souls. 

Mathematics may make moral and spiritual contribu- 
tions. What can be more impressive than its universality, 
the sweep of its higher laws.? Reverence, humility and 
some sense of or desire for harmony with the universe 
comes when the student goes far enough in this subject. 
But, for the schools, the more immediate values appear 
in the methods of teaching the lower branches. To-day 
it is held in close relations to real life ; it so penetrates 
everyday experiences that it involves definite moral inter- 
ests in human relations and behavior. When problems 
deal with food-distribution, health-statistics, interests, 
rents and wages, while the teacher does not need to tag 
a moral, the pupil is always ready to discuss the social 
rights and duties that are involved. It is not enough 
that young people learn how to calculate the profits on 
a transaction ; they must be able to discern all its impor- 
tant elements, to think of it in its entirety and especially 
in its social relations. Where there is no consciousness 
of conduct, under social relations, any efficiencies acquired 
miay be only those of the enemies of society. Meanwhile 
habituation in exactitude is no small discipline of the 
soul because it involves real experiences both in thought 
and in action. It is hardly necessary to call attention 
to a less important but still quite valuable possibility in 
mathematics, the teaching of the current principles of 
commercial honesty and business integrity. Such social 
standards are surely a part of the curriculum of the 
school if its purpose is to prepare pupils for social 
living. 

CHOOSING A VOCATION 

Vocational guidance studies; these often consist in 
courses planned to survey the different occupations, to 
reveal their social functions and to aid in selection of 



SPIRITUAL VALUES IN SCHOOL STUDIES 177 

vocation. They are predicated on great moral concepts, 
such as the duty of work in order to play our part in 
society, the duty of choice under motives of service and 
the duty of fullness of cooperation with all the work of 
society. In the discussion of the various callings their 
ethical standards and their social relations become very 
clear to the minds of students. Pupils may gather the 
codes of professions and callings so far as they have 
been codified,^ and they may endeavor to discover the 
current principles or rules in other cases. These codes 
furnish the basis for discussions that are never lacking 
in interest. The discovery of the existence or the lack / 
of moral rules opens up the whole field of human relations 
in the trades and callings. Scarcely anywhere else is it 
possible to find interest as keen, participation as complete 
as in groups of high-school students discussing this two- 
fold subject: what occupations should we choose and what 
are the rules of the game in these occupations? Further 
a valuable moral contribution is made as the school 
actually aids the pupil in making a wise, suitable choice 
as to his life-work. Given teachers and guides conscious 
of the issues involved, with imagination seeing the youth 
going out into the world of work, it becomes a spiritual 
experience to consider life's opportunities. The total 
attitude toward the world may be determined here. 
Seriousness is natural to youth at this time when he 
thinks of occupation ; it constitutes his great social 
puberty initiation. He may find it a spiritual experience, 
a time of forming high purposes to play his part nobly 
and well, to give a full and rich life to his day. 

Industrial training may have spiritual values. Such 
training is very closely associated with vocational guidance 
and choice. But in the actual hand work in shops new 

1 As, e.g., by the American Medical Association, the various Bar 
Associations and the Rotary Club. All these may be obtained from 
the respective local representatives. 



178 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

possibilities appear. They arise in the peculiar relation- 
ships which here develop between instructors and workers ; 
they come into a common field, on a common plane, work- 
ing together. The informality and freedom of the shop 
with its close contacts gives opportunity for the use of 
personal influence and leadership. Other values appear 
as the shop experience calls out powers of discrimination, 
of foresight and will in the selection of objects of work 
and materials to be used. These are forms of will develop- 
ment and motor control. They throw the pupil on his 
own selfhood ; they call on him to weigh, choose and 
initiate conduct under conditions very like those which 
prevail in everyday life. Such values are easily lost where 
the school regards industrial training simply as a means 
of training mill hands and factory operatives. 

Hygiene, Here the moral values are evident ; the 
religious ones are not less. When we consider the life 
handicap of disease, the spiritual conflict that many wage 
simply because of unnecessary loads on the body one is 
tempted to place this subject first in the category of 
values. Who can live aright with others who is not right 
in himself? Who can live the life of devotion to the 
common good whose goodness harbors dirt and disease? 
And, still more fundamental, the life of the spirit rests 
so largely on these foundations that touch the earth. It 
is hard to live a holy life without a whole life; every 
strain carried by the will on account of unnecessary 
physical disabilities draws off from the power needed for 
life's greater purposes. The program of democratic liv- 
ing calls for the " keen joy of living," for strong and sup- 
ple muscles, for clear minds in clean bodies, for the free- 
dom and vigor of the healthy life. 

Most of all, social duty emphasizes the moral and 
spiritual value of the teaching of hygiene. Personal 
hygiene is only a form of social hygiene; health is 
desirable because one is a member of a larger body which 



SPIRITUAL VALUES IN SCHOOL STUDIES 179 

not only needs our full powers but must be shielded from 
ills we might disseminate. That leads to the study of 
community hygiene as a social duty, to the means by 
which we may cooperate to make this world a healthy 
place to live in, constituting an environment positively 
counting for joy and goodness. 

Personal hygiene is a splendid means of teaching social 
duty under spiritual ideals. Much of the teaching of 
this subject has been highly individualistic. It has often 
tended toward morbid self-consciousness especially where 
undue emphasis has been thrown on the aspect called sex- 
hygiene. All instruction in this special aspect should be 
merged in general hygiene. The facts of the sex life do 
not need the impress of singularity by specialization in 
youth ; they need integrating in the normal ways of life ; 
they need to become part of one's thought of society. 
But this does not lessen the importance of instruction in 
the facts of sex and training in the controlled sexual life. 
The important consideration is that it shall not be segre- 
gated from life, and, still more, that it shall not be 
divorced from its social significances. 

Certain simple facts must be faced regarding the teach- 
ing of the laws of sex-hygiene. They are : that the foun- 
dations of all social well-being lie in physical well-being, 
that immeasurable wretchedness, suffering and social loss 
result from offenses against the laws of sex and repro- 
duction, that much of this is due to ignorance and to 
partial or mistaken knowledge, that parents do not teach 
their children but permit them to acquire information from 
misleading and polluted sources, that the church has 
neglected this field of teaching and, in any case, would 
reach only a fraction of the youth population, and that 
the public schools have the knowledge, the texts, the 
facilities and the access to youth necessary. Let no one 
ask, why impart any information.'* Children are not 
remaining in blissful ignorance — even admitting that 



180 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

ignorance has any elements of bliss — for the street and 
the school-yard companions are their teachers ; they know 
much more than almost any parent suspects. The sad 
fact is that they know so much that is not true and so 
much with vicious emphases. 

Four things have to be held in mind as to the work 
of the schools in moral training in this particular field. 
First, that the purpose is conduct. Courses in personal 
and social hygiene are not designed to satisfy curiosity ; 
they are intended to stimulate toward right living. Light 
thrown on the physical facts of life is for purposes of 
leadership. Second, distinguish between the pathology of 
this subject and the plain clean facts which make for 
health and social ideals. On the point under discussion 
two things are to be taught, how life begins and how it 
is maintained in health. Both are only parts of the 
entire, embracing subject of physical well-being and effi- 
ciency in which this particular subject must be merged. 
The facts on the beginnings of life are a normal part of 
the subject of biology; they can be taught so that it is 
as simple and natural for the youth to know the biological 
facts regarding himself as to know those regarding any 
other living organism. The maintenance of right habits 
of sex ought never to be thrown out into a consciousness 
separate from general health and social duty. The third 
essential is that this subject shall be taught only by 
regular teachers, scientifically qualified, trained not only 
in the biological and physiological laws but also so trained 
that they will teach the subject with reference to social 
conduct. They are teaching in the light of the next 
generation ; they must have in mind the making of the 
democracy of the future. The fourth essential consid-^ 
eration is that no amount of information alone will 
accomplish the desired effect unless accompanied by rever- 
ence of spirit, by strong idealisms and by conscious rela- 
tions to conduct. Youth must be moved to love the right 



SPIRITUAL VALUES IN SCHOOL STUDIES 181 

way of life, to reverence their own lives, their own bodies 
and the Ha^cs of others. To hold in high reverence an 
ideal of purity and personality, to loathe heartily all un- 
cleanness will guide where much knowledge would fail. 
Such idealisms and reverences may be largely generalized, 
young people may be trusted to make their own special 
applications. 

But, next to the matter of scientific accuracy as to 
the facts to be taught, nothing is of greater importance 
than that the teacher shall feel that here one is dealing 
with spiritual issues, that here one is developing ideals 
and creating standards of value for living. This is true 
because here we deal with one of our primary and most 
controlling instincts, here we deal with forces that will 
continue to control large areas all through life, and 
here we touch that part of the life of feeling where ideals 
mount highest, where the greatest sacrifices may be made 
and the largest joys discovered. One has only to con- 
sider for a moment the relation of this pliase of life to 
that which we call character to realize its spiritual im- 
portance. One has only to consider its importance to 
society to realize the duty of a democracy in this respect 
as to the education of the young. 

A few subjects have been taken from the curriculum of 
the school and their opportunities for moral training, for 
the development of spiritual values, have been considered. 
Surely they sufficiently illustrate the principle that teach- 
ing the young the art of social living is, in any of its 
phases, a spiritual process, and that all forms of true 
teaching, when addressed to persons under a consciousness 
of their social relations, are but forms of moral training 
and, in a broad sense, forms of religious education. Such 
considerations are by no means unfamiliar to teachers in 
the public schools, but our mechanical processes,^ our 

1 See the vivid description of current schooling by Professor 
William E. Hocking in his discussion of Education in " Human 



18^ EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

bread-and-butter measures in public instruction, con- 
stantly tend to inhibit the teacher's interpretation of his 
everyday task in spiritual terms. The result is that we 
obtain only routine instruction. Every true teacher deals 
with souls; subjects are only his tools. 

Nature and Its Remaking," page 237. (Yale University Press, 
1918). 



CHAPTER XIV 

SPIRITUAL VALUES IN SCHOOL ACTIVITIES 

Since a school is much more than an agency of instruc- 
tion and is principally an organization of lives it will 
be in the activities of pupils that we shall look for the 
development of moral and spiritual powers. 

It is an axiom of modern education that the activities 
of the school are more important than its formal programs 
of instruction. This principle holds with equal force 
in religious education. In his activities the child has a 
real experience into which all his powers may be projected. 
It becomes a much more complete experience than is 
possible with class instruction. In action purposes are 
formed, projects are undertaken, ideal social purposes 
take form in the will. Ideals become real as they are 
realized in action. 

First, the school, as a total activity may aid in devel- 
oping a democratic ideal of social pui^poses. In itself 
the school is an expression of democracy. It is a social 
institution devoted to the development of society through 
persons. It preaches democracy, clarifying, illuminating 
and enlarging ideals, as it is explicitly organized for 
social ends. In the community, as each person shares 
in supporting and conducting the school, it affords for all 
some experience in democratic living. This participation 
is not confined to tax-paying; it is most valuable in an 
intelligent understanding of the school's work and in 
cooperation therewith, as through Parent-Teachers clubs 
and the like. Further, the very fact that the outstanding 
common institution of community life exists for the devel- 
opment of persons strengthens the community sense of the 

183 



184 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

value of persons. Such impressions affect not only adults ; 
they carry over to the children in the community. The 
school itself, as an activity, is a lesson in the meaning of 
democracy. 

Second, the more direct results will come from tlie 
pupiVs own activities in the school. One can arrive at 
some judgment of the spiritual values of school experience 
by asking as to the changes that take place in the social 
life of the school. What are the effects in attitudes and 
conduct of certain studies and of certain activities? If 
at any time one finds that kindness, consideration for 
others, social cooperation, earnest truth-seeking and con- 
sciousness of social standards for conduct become current 
on the playground and amongst student groups, it is 
usually safe to look for the causes in ideals which have 
grown out of actual experience in school work. Some- 
times the course of development is quite apparent as 
when, following certain courses, children play at civic 
organization, municipal service or do actually attempt 
in seriousness these forms of social relationship. But 
many of the most valuable lessons in democratic living 
come within the normal experience of the school itself and 
involve no social projection beyond its life. 

Spiritual values for democracy are developed in the 
school's discipline, government and organization. A 
school is a little world. It is the child's most immediate 
and impressive world. By its character it is determining 
the meaning of all his worlds. Sanity, order, precision 
and joy may here become normal to his universe. In the 
school where the plan of organization is definitely appre- 
hended by the teachers, where their cooperation and loy- 
alty to its ideals secures staff harmony the student con- 
stantly sees and feels lessons more impressive than any 
that could be put into words. Constantly he is catching 
ideals and adopting standards. What these are often 
appears when the child plays school; they become evident 



SCHOOL ACTIVITIES 185 

when he goes out into the larger world. In such a school 
student-government gives expression to these impressions. 
Student self-government has value only where the school 
itself is Avisely governed. We owe much of the loose and 
morally disjointed, slip-shod methods of civic life to the 
happy-go-lucky, undisciplined, disorganized and often 
chaotic conditions of public-school management. This 
may have seemed inevitable in the small country school 
but it is without excuse in any organized school. 

But the value of all organization and government will 
depend on the degree to which it arises in the pupil's will. 
In this sense it must be self-government. So long as it 
is only imposed it will not be possessed as a personal 
quality. We are training for the life of democracy in 
the schools ; that must be a life of free willing for the 
common good. But our still prevailing idea of school 
discipline is that of a feminine Prussianism, a rose-colored 
but none the less absolute pedagogical autocracy. There 
are two very simple considerations to remember: First, 
school-life is the child's first experience in making wider 
social adjustment; Second, the life of the school is his 
first interpretation of the life of the state. If the school- 
room means the arbitrary regulation of his life, then 
social living is likely to mean that he will be good just 
so long as society succeeds in regulating him, in keeping 
an eye on him and a rod over him. If the administration 
of the school-room is imposed he is likely to feel no 
responsibility, no sense of a common social life and no 
ambition beyond that of beating this over-lord at its own 
game. 

DEMOCRACY AS AN EXPERIENCE 

The suggestion that democracy should actually be prac- 
ticed by classes in the school-room comes as a shock to 
many. " It would never do to let children have so much 
power; they would run away with the school." But that 



186 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

is precisely what the autocrats have always said to pro- 
posals of democracy even for adults. The theory always 
has been that only those who now have the power can 
be trusted with it. Yet there does seem to be some ground 
for the objection that children have not yet acquired the 
powers of self-control; they do not yet know how to 
govern. That objection constitutes the most impressive 
argument for extending the experience of governing to 
them. We do not deny a child the right to sing because 
he has never had a course in singing. We expect he 
will, perhaps, come to the point where his singing may 
justify the listening audience if he has the chance to 
practice and undergo discipline. But, in every art, he 
will never learn without practice, least of all in the art 
of social organization. This art of living in a democ- 
racy, of social self-direction, is acquired just as other 
arts are. It cannot be learned through books or lectures 
or picked up after the habits are fixed. The way to 
become proficient in democracy is to practice democracy. 

Something has already been accomplished by the organ- 
ization of " school cities " and the like in classrooms. All 
such plans have merit in the degree that they furnish 
social experiences in control. But they have one serious 
shortcoming; it is evident to the pupils that they are 
special creations, importations to the class situation. 
The class turns from being a class to become a city or 
a junior republic. The experience of democracy should 
be integral to the normal social situation, or, if it takes 
a new form, the movement should rise spontaneously in 
the will of the group and not be directed or imposed. 
Otherwise the " school city " is likely to be only a routine 
exercise. 

But democratic experience may he provided in the nor- 
mal life of the room and the school, the playground and 
all that belongs to school experience. Here we meet what 



SCHOOL ACTIVITIES 187 

is to many a serious difficulty in thinking of democracy 
as an activity in the school; it is objected that the 
children could not possibly elect their own teachers, nor 
could they select their courses and text-books. This is 
stated, apparently, as a fundamental objection. But it 
is based on the false assumption that the principal func- 
tions of a democracy are exercised in electing officers and 
directing legislation. So far is this from the fact that 
such activities are quite occasional; they are simply 
special forms of exercising those responsibilities in democ- 
racy which belong to adult life. The real practice of 
democracy goes on in all the common life of service, in 
our daily labor as contributing to the common good, in 
service we can render as citizens, in paying taxes, in 
common neighborliness. Just as in society the principal 
activity of democracy goes on through normal participa- 
tion in everyday life so will it be in the democracy of 
the school. To be temporarily debarred from electing 
officers is not to be deprived of the major functions of 
citizenship in democracy. The whole democratic society 
determines this matter of selecting teachers and courses 
— it is important that the child shall clearly see that 
the school is conducted by the will of the people — ; but 
this 3^oung citizen has ample opportunity to contribute 
to the democracy by regular w^ork, voluntary service, 
serious applications to tasks and to play and to the 
social ideals of the school by controls of conduct. 

The special need now is that school people shall take 
their eyes off text-books and school politics long enough 
to realize the possibilities in the child's actual experience 
in the school, that they shall become conscious of the 
school as a society and the child as one of its members. 
Here the child is actuall}^ living a social life, rather than 
" getting ready to live." In that social life many forms 
of activity arise, enterprises develop and powers are 



188 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

called into play. The many-sided response of the child 
to the school's stimulation suggests the variety of forms 
of democratic initiative and control open to him. 

In free play, sports and atJiletics. Here the child is 
essentially at school; more of him is likely to be present 
here than at any other time. To him play is one of 
the most natural experiences of social living. No peda- 
gogical consciousness obtrudes itself and yet nowhere can 
teaching be more effective. Every power of life is called 
into play under conditions and for ends which are often 
thoroughly democratic. Here not only is play effective 
because it involves social mingling but because it develops 
social cooperation, coordinated and concerted action. 
Here social autonomy is exercised ; whatever is done is 
by the will of the people, the playing group. There is 
experience in guiding and modifying the social will under 
the pressure of school opinion. The mode of modification 
may often be far from calm or academic ; but it affords 
real experience in democratic living. In any organized 
play the social will is called into use and developed. A 
game is simply practice in the formation of a common 
goodwill. Play always reveals the anti-social child, the 
one who will not get into the game because he has not 
seen how much better is the common will than his own 
way. Some never get into any game as long as they live ; 
play is one of the best cures for their moral ill. The 
playing group will often succeed in curing selfish individ- 
ualism where the parents have failed. Here, too, the 
future men and women determine how they will play the 
game of life and whether they shall play for the game, 
or merely for winning or for some reward exterior to the 
game. 

In the care of rooms amd grounds. Democracy implies 
common property rights, and responsibilities in the 
school. If the room belongs to the child he must learn 
to accept the stewardship of his rights. Formerly the 



SCHOOL ACTIVITIES 189 

school patrons presented plaster casts to the school rooms 
or hung enlarged photographs of the Forum ; now the 
room decides what it wants and, after discussion for 
weeks in which more is learned of art and beauty than 
ever before, the room experiences community improve- 
ment. It has made its own standard. The group has 
lived through a social passage from " 3^our room " or 
" your old grounds " to our room and our grounds. 

COMMUNITY AS A SCHOOL. 

Community service. The school trains for democracy 
through an organized experience in democracy; a part of 
that experience will be participation in the life of the 
community. If, as a society, the school group does not 
share in community service it does not train for com- 
munity living. A self-centered school cannot educate for 
democracy. This principle has been emphasized by mod- 
ern educational science, regarding education as a social 
experience directed toward a social aim it insists that 
all shall participate in the realities of social action. 
Therefore we find the group leaving the school room and 
going out into the factories and workshops to discover 
their community. They go out, also, to work in their 
community. Civics, mathematics and agriculture effect 
combinations that lead to the cultivation of garden plots, 
the eradication of weeds on the highways, the planting 
of trees and the realization of city ideals. Often it is 
difficult for older folks, with memories of the drill-room 
school, to realize that their children are being properly 
trained, educated, when they take the tools of highway- 
making in hand or do any useful, directed service. But 
all doubts would be removed if we could see what takes 
place in these pupils as they work, how they not only 
thus acquire the text-book lesson but, also, the lessons 
of social cooperation and the habit of thinking of the 
community in terms of obligation and service. 



190 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

The purpose of democracy will convert the community 
into the child's school of social living. It will not only 
regulate its life for his protection : it will direct it so 
that it may be morally creative. It will devise forms of 
social cooperation. It will so organize its activities that 
there is a proper place for the voluntary service of the 
school group. Where the school becomes a part of the 
system of the city or village or county it has a working 
place, and its workers become part of the normal life of 
their community. This was what was happening recently 
when a dozen high-school boys left the building each 
carrying pick, or hoe or shovel. They spent the day 
in a small village, under the village official's supervision, 
in repairing certain spots in the highways and walks. 
They went as volunteers : they certainly enj oyed them- 
selves. But the point is that they identified themselves, 
by a social experience, with their community's life. That 
was effective moral training for democratic living. 

The great war gave a remarkable stimulus to school 
activities in service, calling every child to a share in the 
national enterprise. Red-Cross work, knitting, garden- 
cultivation, food-conservation, thrift, bond-sales, and 
work for children in other lands all projected the child's 
energies, feeling and imagination into the world life. The 
nation became more real and better loved, and the far-off 
world was brought near and into personal relations. The 
child shared the national life in a deeper degree and in 
a new manner, through service and sacrifice. It has been 
possible to make all this service something much finer than 
loyalty to the national group, valuable as that is ; often 
it has become loyalty to universal ideals, a process of 
identifying ourselves with a national life that sought to 
serve splendid aims. Such service has been an expressional 
activity in relation to spiritual ideals. As the vision 
has been kept clear and high it has had spiritual value. 
It has been simple, normal and most valuable moral 



SCHOOL ACTIVITIES 191 

training. But it need not be confined to the times of 
national stress and emergency. Service is the normal 
experience of every member of a democracy. What is 
done when the need stands out in a startling manner may 
be done always — though the degree of intensity may 
vary — so long as there is developed a consciousness of 
common life in the nation and a purpose of loving help- 
fulness toward all men. 

Only a few of the possibilities of developing high pur- 
pose and establishing social habits through the experience 
of activity have been suggested. These simple facts are 
that the school is doing work with active persons ; nor- 
mally they are active all the time, and all their activity is 
determining the quality, the levels and power of their 
lives. They are always in the active mood. The school 
has ceased to be governed by its old-time picture of a 
child as a slightly animated ear, a passive vessel for 
information. Whatever it accomplishes with the child it 
accomplishes through his cooperation. If then, in all 
that it causes the child to do, it has the purpose of train- 
ing his powers of willing, choosing and doing from motives 
of social life, under the democratic ideals of life, as a 
member of a common, loving society, it is always carrying 
on moral training. It is always dealing with spiritual 
natures for social ends. 

It will be objected that the results that flow only from 
a general purpose are vague and likely to be unimportant. 
We are always tempted to turn from general purposes, 
from a common program that is a part of the whole 
school program, to some special efforts, such as courses 
of direct instruction in moral conduct. That is because 
it is difficult for some persons to have faith, hard to 
beheve that the highest good is always a by-product, hard 
to see that when life has its entire program it accomplishes 
its entire purposes. Just as no one finds happiness by 
looking for it, so no one finds strength or elevation of 



192 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

character by any deliberate efforts to these ends. In 
every life spiritual strength comes through unwelcome 
pain, through everyday joys and appreciations, through 
difficulties met and struggle experienced. Desirable mo- 
tives develop in the life by indirection ; they do not come 
usually by observation. 

The principle which leads us to look for spiritual 
effects from the ordinary work of the school is one of 
the highest importance. It is fundamental to moral train- 
ing. We must remember that the spiritual is not a sep- 
arate faculty, a something disintegrated from the total 
personality. It cannot be taken out of the life nor can 
it be treated or influenced without influencing the whole 
of a life. And so that which is sought is the develop- 
ment of a whole life. Whatever symmetrically develops 
the powers of a life develops its moral and spiritual 
powers. Virtues are not separate items to be separately 
acquired. Indeed, it is not a series of virtues that is 
sought but the virtuous person, that is one whose devel- 
oped powers are directed toward certain ideals and ideal 
purposes. 

But to many all these considerations will seem to be 
very far from religious training. They certainly are 
if by religious training is meant instruction about certain 
subjects, biblical lessons and drills in catechisms. But if 
we regard the aim of religious education as that of prepar- 
ing persons to live in a religious society then these school 
experiences will not seem to be without value to that 
end. These school experiences ma}'^ not extend the pupil's 
knowledge of theology, but they may lead to habits of 
thinking about all life and the world in religious terms ; 
they may lead to those habits of mind and of action 
which characterize all religious persons. They will serve 
their purpose in realizing the religious aim of a society 
which sets first spiritual ends and is organized for love 
and truth and goodness. The school which furnishes 



SCHOOL ACTIVITIES 193 

the pupil an experience of a society of common goodwill 
and of loving social cooperation is constantly, without 
the least danger of sectarian trespass, engaged in religious 
education. 

The effectiveness of the school to develop those qualities 
of life which are essential in a democratic society depends 
very largely on our faith in its spiritual possibilities. 
The whole problem of moral training is merged in this 
larger matter of developing social lives, in creating and 
making effective social ideals. The school is efficient in 
moral training in the degree that it stimulates and guides 
the child's spiritual nature, in the degree that it makes 
life mean for him a common living with all, common joy 
and common work under spiritual ideals. 



CHAPTER XV 

THE BIBLE AND PUBLIC EDUCATION 

If a religious spirit is essential for life in a democracy, 
and if this spirit is developed through education, does it 
follow that instruction in the Bible must be included in 
public education? 

Many answer with an emphatic affirmative and they 
bring many arguments to support their contention. 
Those who are urging the use of the Bible in the schools, 
however, often have no special educational basis for their 
claims ; they are likely to believe that religion is something 
which, in a mysterious manner, is conveyed from the 
Bible to those who study it. While we reject this notion 
it is worth while to consider other reasons for including 
the Bible in the materials of education, and to face the 
question whether this book can be used in the public 
schools. 

The Bible is integral to the heritage of democracy. 

Our developing ideal of democracy is the result of a long 

process of moral and intellectual growth, an accumulation 

of spiritual ideals. We have not created it ; it has come 

down from our fathers and each age has enlarged and 

enriched it. This heritage of freedom is inextricably 

woven with the history of the Bible. This is largely 

because the struggle for political freedom was so much a 

struggle for religious freedom. Wyclif, Tyndall, Milton, 

all suggest the relatedness of political emancipation to 

the popular use of the Bible. The ideals of man's worth 

and man's rights inspired the leaders for freedom ; the 

writers seem to be saturated with the language of this 

book. The literature of Anglo-Saxon freedom cannot be 

194 



THE BIBLE AND PUBLIC EDUCATION 195 

understood by one ignorant of the Bible. The prophets 
of democracy found here their strength and inspiration. 
Our peculiar type of civilization is a direct descendant 
of that which Hebrew prophets outlined and Hebrew 
people enjoyed. There are vast differences due to devel- 
opment, but there are the same insistences on certain 
values, personal, ideal and social, and there are the same 
endeavors after freedom of the spirit. He who would 
know the heritage of democracy in world ideals must have 
the prophets and poets of the Bible in his mind. 

The Bible is a unique book and yet a universal book. 
Every man finds his own heart there. Every people finds 
itself at home in the biblical ideals. That is because 
they transcend their own settings ; we lose sight of the 
orientalisms and the common language of religion is heard. 
Thus the Bible becomes for us the most natural and the 
most powerful instrument in developing religious ideals 
and feeling. When we seek to teach religion no other 
literature can approach this. Whatever view we may 
have as to its historic making we are compelled to recog- 
nize it as the supreme religious classic. It has been 
greatly misused in the name of religion, abused as the 
tool of sectarians, and treated as a fetish by the ignorant, 
yet it comes to us with the dew of the morning, stimulating 
with ideals, compelling in its commanding characters, 
touching the deep places of all sincere lives. It is the 
literary precipitation of the spiritual life of a people 
" with a genius for religion." For us who are their 
spiritual heirs it is difficult to think of any kind of train- 
ing for life which omits this book. 

The Bible is peculiarly the book of democracy. When 
we clarify its essence from the incidental we find, all 
through, one consistent, developing emphasis on the inter- 
pretation and valuation of all life in spiritual terms. 
That emphasis is distinct in the later prophets and finds 
its most illuminating setting in the life and teachings of 



196 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

Jesus. Now this central emphasis is also that of democ- 
racy. The total effect of the Bible sets forth those values 
in personality which democracy holds supreme. For the 
strengthening of the spiritual ideal of democracy society 
to-day needs the stimulus of its historical development, 
needs that setting in noble words and that illumination in 
heroic lives which come through an open-minded familiar- 
ity with the Bible. 

Now if the Bible is so valuable Jiow are we to make 
sure that it becomes the spiritual heritage of the children 
of democracy? There is only one institution which 
reaches practically all the children, and so the ready 
answer is, See that the Bible is taught, or at least used, 
in all public schools. That suggestion is easily made, 
but it calls for courses of action in which the difficulties 
and objections seem to be insuperable. These must be 
faced before we can be quite clear as to any plans for 
teaching the Bible as a part of education for democracy. 

There are, first, serious problems which arise in con- 
nection with the three reasons urged for the reading and 
study of the Bible in public schools. These reasons are: 
that it is part of the child's literary heritage, that it is 
of value in moral training, and that the child needs its 
materials for religious instruction. But the three reasons 
are often confused in the public mind. Many are urging 
the literary and moral value of the Bible who are inter- 
ested only in its doctrinal teachings. Those who urge 
the value of its direct moral teachings must face the 
question of its immoral teachings, as in the practices of 
an ancient people and the claims for divine approval of 
social customs long since outlawed. An examination of 
the propaganda for the use of the Bible in the schools 
reveals a preponderance of interest on the dogmatic side. 
The reasons adduced are educational but the motives are 
ecclesiastical. While many teachers recognize and seek 
to use the literary values of the Bible, the vigorous cam- 



THE BIBLE AND PUBLIC EDUCATION 197 

paigns for its introduction into public education are 
distinctly sectarian. 

Now it ought to be clear that we must not endeavor 
to secure the teachings even of our own faith — even 
when we are confidently and complacently certain of its 
superiority — under false pretenses. No purpose is so 
noble it can justify ignoble means. Even though we 
desire with all our hearts, and with the best human aspira- 
tion possible, that all the young should become Christian 
we cannot covertly, by means socially unworthy, attempt 
to secure their conversion. The question of the Bible in 
the schools must be examined altogether apart from our 
convictions regarding our own religious doctrines and 
institutions. 

THE ARGUMENTS FOR THE USE OF THE BIBLE 

The Bible and the child* s literary heritage. The first 
reason for the use of the Bible in schools seems to be a 
good one. The school must help the child discover his 
literary heritage. Not only is the Bible an essential part 
of that heritage but biblical language has saturated all 
our everyday speech. Moreover this book is a part of 
the world's literature. Our day calls for sympathy with 
the thought of people of all lands and times. There is 
the same reason, at least, for the study of the Bible as for 
the use of Greek, Roman, Romance and Norse literature. 
But we must be sure that it is used as literature, subject 
to the laws that govern all literary productions, treated 
precisely as we treat Greek and Norse legends and poetry. 
The school has no right even to suggest its religious 
authority over the child's conscience. We may, with 
propriety, insist that, in our American civilization, the 
Bible lies back of Shakespeare, Milton, Coleridge, Lowell, 
Lincoln and Ruskin. There can be no valid objection to 
the inclusion of passages of literary worth from any 
religious classics. The Shepherd Psalm should be included 



198 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

in school-work, not because of its teaching on God, but 
for the same reason that passages from " In Memoriam " 
are included, because elevated ideas are expressed in 
stately, harmonious and simple language. On the same 
grounds passages from the Buddha legends might be 
included to advantage. Biblical passages, coming under 
this category, are found in school-readers. In high 
schools there could be no valid objection to the reading 
of the book of Ruth, for example. But all this would 
be simply the study of literature. Would that pure 
literary study content the advocates of the Bible in the 
schools ? 

The Bible and moral training. The second reason is 
a part of the public demand for a moral product from 
the schools. But there are serious fallacies in the argu- 
ment that we can depend on the Bible to accomplish the 
moral aims of the school. In the first place, morality 
is more a matter of training than of instruction ; it is 
principally dependent on the actions and habits of the 
life. One might have complete familiarity with the moral 
teachings of the Bible and yet be the veriest rogue and 
menace to society. Moral living does not develop from 
a study of the rules of behavior even in the most exalted 
books. To memorize canons of conduct will not make a 
gentleman. Literature does help in forming ideals but 
it does not insure conduct. Next, the morality of the 
Bible is not the morality of this age. Social ideals have 
developed. The moral conduct of Abraham or of Jacob 
would hardly pass muster to-day. Democracy demands 
more of men. Which would we commend to a young man 
to-day, the example of Jacob or that of Henry Esmond? 
The young find difficulty in modifying Abraham by his 
historic setting. 

It is true that lofty ideals, framed in sublime language, 
are presented in the Bible. They have passed over into 
our common life to such a degree that they owe their 



THE BIBLE AND PUBLIC EDUCATION 199 

authority not so much to the book which contains them 
as to the answer they quicken in our own breasts. They 
have the authority of conscience. Some of the characters 
have been idealized for our times ; they owe their force 
to this idealization rather than to any evident superiority 
to heroes more immediate to our lives. It is difficult to 
be more attracted by Samuel than by Lincoln, or Living- 
ston or by Florence Nightingale. And which would count 
for more to a boy to-day, Saul and David or Chinese 
Gordon, Theodore Roosevelt or Dr. Grenfell.'^ The latter 
are real, comprehensible; the former are entangled in 
historical data and oriental customs. The attempt to 
find nearer at hand material of moral value does not lose 
sight of what has been said on the place of the Bible 
in our spiritual heritage. But it is necessary to discrim- 
inate; there are degrees of value within the Bible. The 
Bible is essential but it is not the most convenient nor 
the most effective material for moral instruction. When 
its use in the schools is urged on grounds of moral teach- 
ings the school-men have consistent objections; they have 
other material, ample and free from divisive elements and 
historical difficulties. They say, moreover, that the 
churches which have entire freedom in the use of the Bible 
do not use it in teaching moral living. Those who are 
insisting on the Bible in the public schools for moral 
purposes are not organizing their own biblical courses in 
churches for moral ends. 

The Bible and religious instruction. This third and 
most common plea comes from those who regard the Bible 
as a book of explicit religious authority. They point 
to the large number of children growing up in ignorance 
of this book and urge that, since it is essential to their 
welfare, the public school is the one agency which can 
give it to them all. This propaganda commonly ignores 
the fact that much biblical material is already in many 
school-readers, that quotations from the Bible abound in 



SOO EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

English literature. Often it denounces the schools 
because they do not make a special subject of Bible-study. 
It is indifferent to what the schools are now doing with 
the Bible because they are not doing what is desired : 
teaching religious doctrines by its use. It would be 
impossible to meet their wishes, not only because religious 
doctrines lie beyond the province of the schools but, 
equally, because there is not and there cannot be agree- 
ment as to what doctrines should be taught nor as to 
how the Bible should be interpreted. 

PROBLEMS AND DIFFICULTIES 

A second group of problems arises from the nature 
of the schools as institutions of a state which is founded 
on freedom of conscience. The Bible has a unique place 
in Christianity ; it is a book of religious authority, 
officially so recognized by most churches. To many it 
is a book of supernatural authority, direct and explicit. 
It contains exact directions for conduct and for belief. 
To others it has authority in the degree that it speaks 
with power ; it is followed where it leads forward. What- 
ever the attitude of individuals may be the Bible has 
become peculiarly an ecclesiastical book, associated often 
with church ordinances and ceremonies. It has been 
differentiated from other literature, in part because it 
is difT'erent in many respects, but more because it has 
been historically associated with the founding of churches, 
with their conflicts one with another, and with their 
propaganda. It cannot be disassociated from these sec- 
tarian connections. It is still commonly used against 
faiths that are at home in the United States, and each 
group tends to use it in a sectarian manner. Parents 
desire their children to know it as the foundations of 
their own faith and the foe of other faiths. 

The sectarian character of the Bible, as it stands in 
popular usage and thinking, and the sectarian aim in 



THE BIBLE AND PUBLIC EDUCATION 201 

biblical instruction must be remembered whenever we 
consider a plea for its use in the public schools. The 
schools are public institutions and the public life of 
America is absolutely committed to the principle of the 
separation of church and state. When the state lends 
its power to support any particular creed it steps beyond 
its province, it passes from the civic realm into that of 
conscience ; it breaks the agreement of freedom of con- 
science upon which this democracy is established. When 
the public-school teacher treats the Bible as a book of 
religious authority, using it in worship or for dogmatic 
purposes, that teacher, while an agent of the state, is 
engaging in religious functions of an explicit character 
and is trespassing on the rights of the churches. He is 
offending against personal religious liberty. Even though 
we may agree entirely with the doctrines that are taught, 
though we may admire the worship, we must still insist 
that the state has no right to teach religion, as such, 
and that we have no right to depend on its power for 
the propagation of our own faith, for we would oppose 
the propagation of error by the same agency. It is 
easy to understand how many indorse the teaching of 
religion in the schools — meaning their own religion, but 
the plan is fair neither to the school nor to the churches. 
If it is urged that the schools can agree on a common 
body of biblical teachings, the answer is that it is not 
the business of the school to determine the content of 
religious teaching; it is not their duty to formulate a 
common American creed, nor have they the right to 
select any sort of literature for the schools on a doctrinal 
basis. That they can select and use parts of the Bible 
purely as literature no one questions, but any selections 
made upon a doctrinal principle would be offensive to 
nine-tenths of the people. So far as any attempt, as 
has been seriously proposed, to agree on a few simple 
statements of religious truth, is concerned, such a state- 



202 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

ment, no matter how simple, would constitute the creed 
of the public schools which adopted it. Whenever we 
find ultimate common ground in religion we get down to 
a substratum that is already commonly held, that has 
no special significance for life, a creed too thin for life's 
foundations. 

The public school is not prepared for the work of teach- 
ing religion. Teachers are not trained for that purpose. 
They are not selected with reference to their creeds, as 
a rule. Nor are we, on serious thought, prepared to com- 
mit the religious teaching of children to teachers who may 
have no effective religious life or who may be of faiths 
emphatically different from those in which we would train 
our children. The state has a right to engage teachers 
of any faith ; but usually parents are not quite ready to 
have religion taught to their children by Catholics, 
Protestants, Jews, Christian Scientists or what not. In 
fact the school system does not regard the teacher as a 
teacher of religion. If it did it would institute courses 
in teaching religion in the normal colleges ; it would engage 
teachers with reference to abilities in this field, and it 
would test their work by results in religious knowledge. 
Lacking the consciousness of this duty the state expects 
no professional training with reference to religion. The 
result is that any efforts in this direction are purely those 
of amateurs so far as teaching is concerned. 

State instruction in religion is an invasion of the rights 
of the churches. In the degree that we seek to lay this 
duty on the public schools we rob the churches of their 
greatest religious opportunity and privilege. When the 
church evades the duty of proper religious instruction and 
turns to the public schools, saying " You do this," she 
closes the door on her future. There can be no church 
to-morrow unless the church trains the children to-day. 
We have no right to relinquish the religious training of 
the young. It is a private duty that cannot be given to 



THE BIBLE AND PUBLIC EDUCATION 203 

public agencies. Primarily it is a duty of the family; 
here it must begin and be maintained. Then, as families 
are associated in churches, they are able to agree on suit- 
able teachers of religion for their children in the churches. 
This selection they cannot make with reference to public- 
school teachers. It is a careless, thoughtless attitude, one 
of indifference to the importance of religion, that leads to 
the demand that the school take over this duty ; it fails 
to see that this work calls for special training, for an 
atmosphere of religion and for spiritually minded persons. 
The agitation for direct biblical instruction in the 
schools is due to two causes ; first, it is an attempt to 
lay another duty on these public agencies, a part of the 
habit of extending the field of public activities, and, 
second, it is an attempt to import the customs of other 
countries having civic ideals and civil conditions different 
from ours. Now, in the United States, we cannot urge 
English methods for England still has a state church; 
also, England is by no means united as to the propriety 
of religious instruction in state schools. We cannot 
urge German methods because the German system of 
control down to the last detail of the content of instruc- 
tion was possible only under Prussianism. Even the prac- 
tices of New Zealand, Australia and Canada do not hold 
good for the United States, for these countries still follow 
the traditional ways of their mother land. 

PROPOSED SOLUTIONS 

Acknowledging the difficulties and limitations as to the 
use of the Bible in public schools it has been urged that 
it would be possible not only to exercise freedom in 
teaching the Bible but to extend into thorough religious 
instruction by one of the following plans: 1, Through 
pastors, priests or appointed church workers who would 
visit the schools at stated periods in order to teach 
religion. But this would be to ignore the principle of 



204< EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

separation between church and state : it would take advan- 
tage of the power of the state to gather children ; it 
would use the equipment of the public agency for private 
purposes. Further, it would tend to disrupt the social 
unity of the school by injecting sectarianism, by quick- 
ening the consciousness amongst children of church lines 
of division. 2, By providing that schools be dismissed 
for one half day each week in order that students may 
go to their churches for religious instruction.^ This plan 
is without objection so far as questions of civil relation- 
ships are concerned. It could mean, however, nothing 
more than the erection of an extended Sunday-school 
program in the midweek. It has no special relation to 
the question of teaching religion or the Bible in public 
schools save as it would tend to make it less necessary. 
This plan is not the same as the so-called Gary system; 
here a regular schedule of classes is maintained by the 
united efforts of the churches and children are in at- 
tendance at religious instruction in a number of church- 
schools — in practically continuous operation — when 
they are free from the regular public-school program." 
Neither of these plans, nor the numerous forms of after- 
school instruction carried on by the churches in New 
York, must be confused with plans to teach religion in 
the public schools. These plans have no organic relation 
to the schools ; they use neither their time, money, forces 
nor authority. 3, It is proposed to teach religion indi- 
rectly in the schools, using the Bible in literature. But 
we ought to be honest, not attempting to crowd religion 
in surreptitiously; when the Bible is taught for its 
religious values — our religious values — it is dishonest 
to call that the teaching of Literature. 4, By the presen- 

1 Proposed by Dr. G. U. Wenner in " Religious Education and the 
Public Schools," (Am. Tract Soc). 

2 The Gary plan is discussed under " Community Organization." 
Full particulars may be obtained by addressing the Religious Edu- 
cation Association, 1440 E. 57th St., Chicago. 



THE BIBLE AND PUBLIC EDUCATION 205 

tation of religion as a subject of scientific study. This 
might be perfectly proper, but it would be devoid of 
religious value. Religion as a subject of knowledge is 
not necessarily religious. To master its history may not 
mean that one is mastered by its spirit. 5, By Worship. 
It is still the custom in many places to open public 
schools with religious worship. The practice is forbidden 
by statute in some states. The prevalence of the custom 
is due to its long establishment ; it comes to us from two 
sources, tradition first, the methods in vogue for so long 
in days when there was agreement on Christianity as the 
one faith, and also from the tendenc}^ to think of the 
school assembly in churchly terms. But a consideration 
of what is really taking place in public-school worship 
must give us grave thought. Selections from the Bible 
are read as selections from other books are not read; it 
is treated as a book of peculiar religious authority. 
Hymns are sung which were written to express and develop 
specific doctrinal concepts. The principal, or teacher, 
or visitor offers prayer, a distinct act of religion with 
definite doctrinal significances. In a word, the state here 
takes over the functions of a church. No matter how 
desirable it may seem to be to cultivate a spirit of wor- 
ship, is it really fair, is it honorable toward the Jew — 
to be specific — to use this school which he is compelled 
to support as a means of propagating a faith contrary 
to that which he holds ? Can any faith afford to advance 
itself by unfair means .^^ 

Arguments drawn from the custom of prayer in legis- 
lative halls will avail nothing here. The case does not 
rest on precedent but on right. It ought not to be 
decided either by legislative custom or enactment ; it ought 
to be decided by our own sense of justice. But the legis- 
lators do not engage in sectarian worship — nor usually 
in any sort of worship ; even that is beside the point, 
for legislatures may act unconstitutionally. Nor does 



206 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

the case of chaplains in the army apply, for they are ap- 
pointed under an agreement between the different church 
communions. In both cases only mature persons are af- 
fected who can and do use their powers of mental inhibi- 
tion and their right to be absent. 

General exercises are a valuable part of school training, 
but they ought not to be ecclesiastical, nor doctrinal, nor, 
in the popular sense, religious exercises. The religion of 
the school finds expression in an ideal of citizenship. If 
you want to see school children really worship go to a 
general assembly focussed on patriotic ideals. Social 
aspiration and service give ample opportunity for common 
feeling and devotion for the school group. 

There is only one attitude for the religious citizen, one 
equally essential to the preservation of civic freedom and 
to the welfare of religious agencies : it is to stand uncom- 
promisingly on our spiritual principle of the necessary 
freedom of religion and the consequent separation of 
church and state. This attitude is no small contribution 
to democracy ; it is democracy expressing itself as to 
the relations of the state to the religious life and to 
religious thought. 

Doubtless it seems that we have only suggested diffi- 
culties and have offered no suggestion of a solution of 
the problem of religion in the schools of a democracy. 
This is inevitable : there is no solution, so far as formal 
relations are concerned, which will give religious teaching 
a place in the schools. We must remember that the prob- 
lem goes back of any question of religion in the schools ; 
it exists in this form simply as a phase of the under- 
lying problem of securing for religious teaching an 
adequate place in the child's program and experience. 
The problem to be solved is not, how can we get religion 
into the schools, but, how can we get religion into the 
child's life.'^ Before that problem it is worth while to 
clear the ground, to make up our minds as to certain 



THE BIBLE AND PUBLIC EDUCATION 207 

methods which cannot be used and certain agencies which 
are not available. Then we can take the next step of 
concentrating attention on the development of the means 
and the agencies which are available. If the schools 
cannot be used, if the Bible cannot be formally taught 
in public schools, why waste time over that issue.'' Would 
it not be well to go back to the original purpose and 
begin to improve the opportunities now at hand and open 
to us in which the Bible may be taught .'^ 

The blame for ignorance of the Bible lies not with the 
public schools but with those who are directly responsible 
for religious instruction ; it lies with those who clamor 
to have the Bible taught in schools and who also crowd 
the children into basements, cut the time schedule, furnish 
untrained teachers and levy on the children for the sup- 
port of a school which they call a Bible school. We 
trifle with religious education in religious agencies and 
then ask civil agencies to take it seriously. We say 
that religion is the all-important concern for the child 
and for the welfare of civil life ; but there is no evidence 
that we mean what we say for religion is the last matter 
and the least to which we pay attention in the child's 
educational program. We have no right to criticize the 
public schools for any shortcomings so long as our own 
efforts are so feeble, so fainthearted. When the church 
takes the child with anything like the seriousness with 
which the state treats him, the new kingdom, the democ- 
racy of the spirit, will be much nearer at hand. There 
is no reason why the churches of a community should 
not fully and properly provide for all the religious instruc- 
tion needed by all their children. It will call for only 
as much thought and investment as is needed for our 
community provision for general education.^ 

1 For a discussion of this point, and on the practical methods 
involved see " Religious Education in the Church," Henry F. Cope 
(Scribners, 1918). 



208 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

Along with an adequate program in the churches, along 
with the acceptance of full responsibility for all direct 
religious teaching of the young, it is important that there 
should develop a sound opinion and social attitude as 
to the relationships between the churches and the public 
schools in educational matters. This necessity is the 
prime reason for what may seem to be a long discussion 
of a negative character. Every attempt to secure 
religious ends by means that are not wholly right defeats 
those ends. Every attempt to evade the law or to ignore 
the civil and social rights of all others — no matter how 
erroneous their creeds may seem to be — only stirs divisive 
strife, obscures spiritual purposes and hinders the realiza- 
tion of a united, spiritual society. Besides, the agitation 
which emphasizes the values of biblical instruction in the 
schools tends to create an opinion that this is the only 
way that religious values arise in school life and to lead 
teachers to forget those means of spiritual influence and 
leadership which do not raise controversial questions. 

If we are estopped from the use of the Bible as a special 
religious literature we are not estopped from spiritual 
results in the schools. All that training which democracy 
involves and requires is essentially a training of the spirit ; 
it may be given in the schools and it must be or they 
fail of their purpose. No one will accuse a school of 
sectarian influence because it leads children to love their 
neighbors and to follow the life of goodwill and service. 
No one will bring the charge of sectarianism because the 
school aids children to live the life of truth and goodness, 
to reahze the ideal of a spiritual democracy. The school 
is expected to be a force developing character by reveal- 
ing life, inspiring motives, training habits and quickening 
ideals. It cannot avoid these spiritual duties, for it is 
an educator of those who are spirits, and it either develops 
a certain spirit of life or it does not train for democracy. 



THE BIBLE AND PUBLIC EDUCATION 209 

Would we not do well, then, in the churches, to accept 
our own special share in religious training and to lend 
our energies to aiding the school in discharging their spir- 
itual mission? 



CHAPTER XVI 

ORGANIZING THE COMMUNITY 

Education for democracy will involve the democratiza- 
tion of our entire experience of life under an education 
ideal so that all living will be a scheme of education ; a 
plan of education undemocratic in any particular cannot 
train for full democracy. 

Our institutions have been developed under political 
freedom; they have been modified by experience and in 
response, to some degree, to the public will. A vital, 
social aim is molding them to-day, but they are far from 
being truly democratic. For democracy implies more 
than freedom; it implies purpose, the united action of 
a people for a better society. No commanding, unifying 
purpose has been generally followed, nor have we recog- 
nized any common principles under which our varied edu- 
cational activities might be coordinated. Our endeavors 
are divided between homes, elementary schools, high 
schools, churches, community agencies, colleges and uni- 
versities. Some relationships have been established be- 
tween the formal schools which take the child on from the 
age of six to the end of a college career. But it would 
be a mistake to think of these schools as constituting an 
educational system. The public school gets the child 
when his education is half completed ; by the time he en- 
ters its doors his life has received its most significant 
development. The public schools have, as yet, little to 
do with the child's hours of leisure when the process of 
education is most active, and they are debarred from 
formal endeavors to develop him as a religious person. 

There are those who hold that the present situation is 

210 



ORGANIZING THE COMMUNITY 211 

inevitable, that it inheres in our political freedom. Cer- 
tainly^ if unity meant uniformity, or if it implied central- 
ized control we would resist all efforts to coordinate edu- 
cation. In spite of the fact that popular education is the 
first duty of a democracy, in spite of the fact that educa- 
tion for democracy must include all the powers of life 
and, to be effective, must proceed in all its phases under 
unifying social concepts, we do well to make haste slowly 
in the organization of education. We are not willing, 
in its important, determinative activity, that there should 
be so much as the semblance of autocratic control. Even 
though we might have the power of selecting the educa- 
tional authorities we are not ready to commit unreservedly 
to them matters so vital. We fear the dead hand of tra- 
dition ; we fear the tendency of fixed boards to become 
dull and wooden, conservative and unresponsive to the 
public will ; most of all we fear the attempt to standardize 
processes, to establish arbitrary fixed norms in matters 
so vital as education where the elements of personality 
with all its differences enters in so largely. And, when 
we seek to include the elements of spiritual training, it is 
difficult to conceive how any board, no matter how broad 
its intellectual sympathies might be, could design and 
direct systems for all the children of all the people. 

Education affects so directly the ideals and the wills 
of people that a free nation will always regard with sus- 
picion any attempts to establish centralized control. 
Free schools must not only be free from fees for tuition, 
they must be free to respond to the public will. Germany 
established control with the indubitable purpose of mold- 
ing a nation to the inherited will of a predatory monarch 
and a military caste, making of a people a single intelli- 
gence and will, automatically registering in response to 
its rulers. The result has been the sacrifice of freedom, 
the loss of those spiritual qualities upon which freedom 
grows — free vision of ideals, virility of conscience and 



21^ EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

sympathetic consciousness of common human rights — 
and the creation of the most serious problem the mod- 
ern world has faced. 

But centralized or autocratic control is not essential 
to a fairly complete system of education. Here, as else- 
where in a free society, the one thing needed is a common 
will based on intelligence and worthy purpose. This com- 
mon will would be the universal standard in education. 
It would grow out of an understanding of the social proc- 
esses of education, of the needs of persons and society 
in a democracy, and the gradual establishment of minimum 
standards based on the rights of those being educated and 
the needs of society. The next step would be unity of 
action in social units to see that in every detail the needs 
of society are met, that existing activities are coordi- 
nated and provision is made for whatever may be lacking 
in our present plans. 

The community is the unit in which it is feasible, and 
natural, to secure educational unity and comprehensive- 
ness. Communities have already learned to cooperate in 
providing instruction for children through certain years. 
The public schools are demonstrations of community pro- 
grams as far as they go. The group constituting a com- 
munity is a working unit, conscious of its own needs, re- 
sponsive to these needs and capable of meeting them. 
They may constitute the units of a larger and more gen- 
eral organization, the many communities finding ways of 
cooperation through their community of interests. 

The first step is for the community to discover a com- 
mon ideal and standard of education. It must answer the 
questions. What are the rights of our children? What 
are the functions of children in community life? ^ What, 
in view of the future of democracy, is a right program 

1 A question answered in a special study made for the Religious 
Association by Professor George A, Coe, published in Religious Edu- 
cation for February, 1918, 



ORGANIZING THE COMMUNITY 213 

for these children? It must establish standards of com- 
munity life determined by the rights of lives and the needs 
of democracy and not by the exigencies or the greed of 
business. In a word, the community must come to see 
itself as existing for democracy and as functioning by 
education. Every community goes through some of these 
three stages of progress : First, a recognition of exist- 
ence, the simple realization that a group is being formed; 
second, conscious purpose to enlarge, strengthen and 
organize the group ; that is the stage of most communities 
to-day, and, third, consciousness of function, an awaken- 
ing to the question. What is the ultimate purpose of this 
community? When that stage is reached they outgrow 
the old standards expressed in civic statistics ; they are 
not content with the aims of commerce and industry, nor 
can they rest satisfied with beautifying streets simply 
that they may be more beautiful than some other streets. 
Men do not care to live in " Spotless Town " if all the 
town exists for is to be spotless. Better to be in a mud- 
hole trying to grow men than on a marble slab in a grave- 
yard. 

THE PURPOSE OF A COMMUNITY 

The ideal community has specific purposes. It is a so- 
cial organization for the sake of people. Gradually it 
tends to interpret all its life in terms of their lives. Its 
programs of commercial development, schemes for the city- 
beautiful, parks and institutions, laws and ordinances, are 
all parts of its general plan of growing, strengthening 
and directing lives. It finds its function, a vital one — 
dealing with persons, an educational one — developing 
their lives, a democratic one — associating them in a com- 
mon life for the good and happiness of all. 

The first and greatest contribution a community can 
make toward education for democracy will be the develop- 
ment, in all its people, of the habit of looking out over 



214 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

its entire life and asking, Just how does this or that make 
for the manhood and womanhood we need? Just how 
does this or that promote or retard the common social 
life of goodwill and goodness? This is the growth of a 
consciousness of function. It is to think of the township 
or village or ward as having a definite, controlling pur- 
pose, as existing in order that people may find the condi- 
tions most favorable, the stimuli most helpful and the 
opportunities of activity most effective for the realization 
of full social living. 

The commimity in a democracy, then, accepts an edu- 
cational function. The purpose which finds expression in 
the maintenance of public schools penetrates every activ- 
ity of the community. Where a sense of this responsi- 
bility exists it will organize itself. The local group has 
its machinery for civil government, but, at present, it 
lacks organization for larger social purposes. It has the 
means of syndicating its resources to secure common con- 
veniences and necessities, such as light, water, sanitation, 
policing and transportation. But its council, or govern- 
ing body, is concerned exclusively with these physical con- 
ditions and, usually, regards them apart from their rela- 
tionship to the higher life. Either the representative 
body must be directed by a full consciousness of the pri- 
macy of the interests of persons, or, since this is not 
likely to be possible because they are chosen for other 
ends, there must be created another body which will repre- 
sent the community in its interests in moral and spiritual 
well-being. 

Community direction for spiritual ends waits for the 
formation of representative bodies chosen for their wisdom 
and power in this field. At present, no matter how well- 
disposed the common council may be, it has been elected 
to administer public affairs on an economic basis. If it 
provides for welfare it does so, not because welfare is its 



ORGANIZING THE COMMUNITY 215 

primary concern, but because to neglect it altogether 
would interfere with the orderly administration of eco- 
nomic affairs or might reflect on the city's fair name. 
Votes are seldom determined by any consideration of a 
purpose in civic life — except the purpose of keeping 
one administration in, or getting another in. So that we 
do not have an organization of community life, but only 
of certain interests. The larger task waits for fitting 
organization. The peculiar nature of the task, its height 
and breadth, seem to demand a special organization for 
direction. Just as the public has committed to special 
boards the care of the parks, to others the libraries and 
still others the schools, so it may well create a directing 
organization which will organize community life as a 
school of democracy. 

Such an organization might be called the Board, or 
Council of Moral and Religious Education. It would be 
better, as a rule, to be less exact and to call it simply 
The Community Council. Then it could direct its ener- 
gies toward moral and religious training. There is noth- 
ing new or startling about this suggestion. The writer 
advocated it over ten years ago and the plan has been 
adopted in a number of villages. It differs somewhat 
from the Maiden (Mass.) plan -^ since it calls for an organ- 
ization representative of all the ideal interests which will 
attempt the organization of all the common activities of 
the community so that they may form a unitary pro- 
gram designed to develop character. The plan would 
work in complete harmony with the Community Center 
organization, adding thereto a representative body which 
would become the agency through which the Center would 
carry forward its community programs for ideal ends. 

The Community Center is a helpful and simple form 

1 Advocated and promoted by Professor Walter S. Athearn, notably 
at Maiden, Mass., at Lowell and a number of other places in Mass. 



216 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

through which community organization may be realized. 
The Centers ^ are the natural development of many ef- 
forts to secure active neighborliness, growing out of Neigh- 
borhood Clubs, Open Forums, School-Centers, Parent- 
Teacher Clubs and the like. The plan is now being pro- 
moted by state organizations ; state universities are ap- 
pointing officers to develop its usefulness ; the United 
States Bureau of Education is aiding its application to 
educational problems, and the President of the United 
States wrote a letter urging the formation of community 
councils.^ The constitution proposed in the pamphlet is- 
sued by the Bureau of Education suggests the following 
specific activities: Forum, Recreation, Civics (informa- 
tion, education, service). Home and School, Buying Club, 
Community Bank. The Centers may be characterized as 
organizations to do together all things that can be done 
together. They are much like town meetings that func- 
tion all the time, that cover practically all common inter- 
ests and that carry out their own decrees. Their simple, 
democratic form, their high ideals and their practical 
emphases are rich with promise. They may be directed to 
an educational program for the entire life of the com- 
munity. They may be saturated with an educational 
consciousness which recognizes the spiritual needs of a 
democracy. 

A COMMUNITY COUNCIL 

The community needs democratic leadership. As the 
Center brings them together they will look for guidance 
in work, instruction in community principles and training 
in method. Guidance will be needed to coordinate the 
existing activities and to plan new ones. This work of 

iThey are described in Bulletin No. 11, 1918, of the U. S. Bureau 
of Education, " A Community Center, What it is and How to 
Organize it." Price ten cents. 

2 Woodrow Wilson in a letter to the Councils of Defense in the 
different States, under date of March 13, 1918. 



ORGANIZING THE COMMUNITY 217 

leadership and coordination would belong to the Council. 
It would plan careful surveys looking toward common 
programs, toward the suppression of social menaces and 
sources of moral contagion, to the development of friendly 
forces and agencies and to the provision of ample, happy 
healthful recreation, instruction and service. 

Can such a council provide for comrnwnity action in 
religious education? There is no doubt that it can se- 
cure community action in the most valuable forms of re- 
ligious development as it makes recreation, amusement 
and social living stimulating, helpful and a means of ideal 
social experience. This — the life of streets, playgrounds, 
homes and social mingling — counts more than all besides 
in actually developing character. To be surrounded 
with a moral atmosphere favorable to righteousness, to 
social goodwill, to see constantly the object lesson of a 
community devoted to the good of all is the most effective 
form of religious training. In all that follows this must 
not be forgotten. Yet children need more. They need 
that direct religious instruction which both enables them 
to interpret this atmosphere and example and to under- 
stand and practice its methods. This direct instruction 
the public schools cannot give, the homes either will not 
or cannot, and the churches, at present, devote less than 
an hour a week to giving small groups instruction at the 
hands of amateurs. The churches reach fewer than forty 
per cent, of the children ; their instruction in the Sunday 
schools is an antithesis of that to which they are accus- 
tomed and, being given in church groups, it tends to set 
off this instruction from the united community life. If 
we are to make democracy a spiritual experience for the 
child we must make his religious experience in instruc- 
tion truly democratic ; it must become a part of his com- 
munity life. It must have a larger share of his time, for 
it is manifestly impossible to learn anything in from forty 
to fifty periods of thirty-five minutes each a year, espe- 



218 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

cially when, as a rule, these do not occur under school 
conditions. It must have a larger share of his active 
experience, for instruction standing alone can accomplish 
little ; it must be so organized as to become a part of 
his everyday living in the social group ; it must go on, 
under normal conditions, into his play and work. 

Adequate religious instruction is impossible under the 
program of the present typical Sunday school. It is as 
impossible as general education would be if all the children 
were divided into sectarian groups, limited to one period 
a week and left without financial support or proper su- 
pervision. Even though general education were possible 
in parish schools education for democracy would not be 
possible there. The young cannot learn the life of de- 
mocracy in caste and class institutions. It is as necessary 
that religious instruction be democratic as that general 
instruction should have that character. So long as the 
religious instruction is disassociated from a genuine com- 
munity experience there will be difficult}^ in carrying over 
that instruction into practical community living. The 
effect of confining the teaching of religion to churches is 
often an impression that the practice of religion is con- 
fined to the same area. 

The present Sunday school is wastefully inadequate. 
The system of independent small groups, each school 
teaching a series of smaller groups, each maintaining its 
own staff and equipment is not only bad as it divides 
social life but it is exceedingly wasteful. This is discov- 
ered as soon as it is attempted to place a church school 
on a plane of educational efficiency. It costs almost as 
much as though each school were attempting to meet the 
needs of all the children of a community. There is fur- 
ther waste in current plans as they lay on the community 
the strain of a peak-load of religious instruction on one 
hour of each week with absolutely no load all through the 
rest of the week. That is as economically wasteful as a 



ORGANIZING THE COMMUNITY 219 

system of street cars designed to carry the entire popu- 
lation to Sunday morning service and to lie idle all the 
rest of the week. 

The inadequacy of the present Sunday school for the 
community's need for religious training is due largely 
to the fact that the school is an inheritance rather than 
a designed institution. It was planned for quite other 
work than it now seeks to perform. It has been devel- 
oped in a manner that carries over much obsolete ma- 
chinery and maintains impossible limitations. It is still 
conscious only of a duty to give the young instruction 
about the Bible rather than to give training in living a 
religious life in a democracy. It still lacks any con- 
sciousness of a community mission. It is conceived in 
ecclesiastical terms rather than in terms of a democracy 
of the spirit. 

Our complex social order makes vastly increased de- 
mands on children. Living is more complicated; life's 
moral strain is more intense. And, much more exacting 
than any current conditions, than any struggle for per- 
sonal goodness, are the demands of our own social ideals. 
This day calls for men and women who can make the 
kingdom of heaven a current reality. Our vision of a 
democracy of the spirit must come down to the practical 
terms of living, of industry and social intercourse. But 
that vision cannot become an actuality by means of gen- 
eralized hopes ; it requires both trained spirits and par- 
ticularized efficiencies in methods. The inadequacy of 
our present plans becomes evident when we realize that 
we seek, through religious training, the preparation of 
the child for the great problems of democracy, for life in 
this polarized world, that we hope he can learn to live 
on the plane of spiritual values with others and to make 
this a world guided by the life of the spirit. Can that be 
done by separating the children into little groups to listen 
to often aimless talks for thirty minutes every Sunday.? 



220 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

In a word, we need a new religious education. Are we 
ready for its broader program? Are we ready, in the 
light of the needs of democracy, animated by the hope of 
a spiritual society, to take the steps necessary to furnish 
a full program of religious training? Are we ready to 
tear down and to build anew, instead of patching here 
and there, building now according to the demands of our 
day and the promise of a kingdom of God? Such a pro- 
gram is possible only as it is conceived in terms of the 
life of all the people and carried out on a common pro- 
gram for all who are willing to unite in it. 



CHAPTER XVII 

A COMMUNITY PROGRAM 

If the community is the unit through which we must 
seek to secure an extension of religious training in prepa- 
ration for the hfe of democracy what are the steps neces- 
sary to organize a community program? 

First, to convert the religious agencies to a democratic 
spirit. The churches are insisting that Jesus was the 
world's great democrat, but frequently they are more 
brahmanistic than democratic ; they tend to separate peo- 
ple into more or less self-satisfied groups ; they afford chil- 
dren only a special sect experience in education. If reli- 
gious experience is to be effective for democracy it must 
itself be democratic. Caste experience in training is not 
training for a common, social life. 

What can be done.^ Would our churches be any less 
attractive or their membership any smaller if, instead of 
planning the religious training of the young as a scheme 
of recruiting their own organizations, it should be ar- 
ranged primarily as a preparation for a spiritual society, 
a religious democracy? Such a plan would not only en- 
rich the curriculum as to its practical content but it 
would thoroughly socialize all the experience of children 
in their church schools. It would make the school of 
religion an actual experience in living in a common so- 
ciety. Even though the school could not include always 
the entire community — though that would be a desirable 
aim — it would be so representative that to be in it would 
be to realize community living. It is to be doubted if we 
can hope to spiritualize community life until we have 

thoroughly socialized religious life. 

221 



222 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

The religious organizations of the community need, 
next, such an impressive, intelligent understanding of the 
requirements of their village or neighborhood as shall com- 
pel the development or remaking of present methods un- 
til they shall be adequate to the task of reaching all the 
children and reaching all their needs in the spiritual life. 
If we really believe that it is essential for every child that 
he have proper religious training we will not permit tra- 
ditions, sectarian divergencies nor ecclesiastical interests 
to stand in the way of the children's rights. If we take 
rdigious education as seriously as we have taken general 
education we will find a way just as we have found a way 
in spite of all the difficulties with public education. If 
we have any regard for the fully sixty per cent, of the 
child population not now reached by the church schools 
we will confess our present failures and take up this prob- 
lem with open-minded seriousness. Moreover, if we have 
looked squarely at our present systems and have realized 
how little fruitage they bear in the realities of life, how 
little they have to do with the making of our social order 
or with determining the character of a community, we will 
be anxious to discover and apply plans of religious train- 
ing that will have some effect on life. The present situa- 
tion is that, in spite of many organizations, much serious 
effort and much money expended, we have a task but 
partially accomplished and that only for a few. 

Before a solution of the problem is possible, however, 
we need an awakened commimity, one with a sense of re- 
sponsibility for the spiritual in its life. Communities are 
accepting responsibilities for the lives of people ; can they 
evade responsibility for any part of life.'* If they are 
responsible for health, why not for health of mind.? If 
they accept responsibility for conduct can they avoid 
responsibility for character.'* This does not mean that 
communities will formally adopt religious professions or 
creeds. But they are adopting creeds which are essen- 



A COMMUNITY PROGRAM 223 

tially religious. They even publish these creeds, such as 
" We believe it is our duty to make the best pos- 
sible place to live in. We place first the interests of our 
children, health before commerce," etc. Such professions, 
whether stated formally or not, imply the acceptance of 
responsibility for the full development of every life. 
When we stop to think we know that our communities 
exist for ends not to be expressed in statistics of the 
census, in wealth or in size. If they care only for our 
bodies of what worth is it to make us healthy brutes 
only to gore and devour in their rich and beautiful pas- 
tures.'^ The community has a cure for souls because it 
exists for persons. 

The religious responsibility of the community does not 
interfere with the freedom of the churches. It does not 
dictate their views or their tasks. It does not deprive 
them of their work of religious education. But it accepts 
a responsibility to make it possible for the spiritual 
agencies, whether churches or families, to do their full 
work. In its program of coordination of agencies it 
recognizes the churches and their functions and calls on 
the entire community to stand back of all agencies that 
support and develop the religious life. 

Community cooperation at feasible tasks is the next 
step ; there are things which all the people of a community 
can do together in the field of religious service. Just how 
easy it has been for all the people, regardless of creedal 
affiliations, or of none, to work together in social serv- 
ice, in deeds expressive of high religious purpose has been 
demonstrated during the period of the great war. In a 
like mood other needs are met when their seriousness is 
realized. One of the tasks at which it has been proven 
it is possible to secure community cooperation is that of 
week-day instruction of children in religion. Back of all 
efforts in this direction lies the long agitation for reli- 
gious teaching in public schools, and back of that even 



2^4 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

the common custom of such teaching; then there is also 
the growing recognition of the inadequacy of the present 
church school even under the best of conditions. Seek- 
ing to provide a larger measure of instruction in religion 
schools have been established which meet during the week, 
often with programs of instruction providing from two 
to three hours of regular work for all pupils in the ele- 
mentary schools who care to attend. Some of the schools 
have trained, professional teachers devoting their entire 
time under regular salary contracts, their work being 
guided by expert supervisors. 

WEEK-DAY RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION 

Weelc-day instruction develops as a community enter- 
prise. At first it was assumed that all that was neces- 
sary was to extend the time program of the Sunday school 
into the week. But it soon became evident that this meant 
only spreading the present inefficient efforts over a larger 
area of time, with the same purely amateur workers and 
the same results as before. It involved, also, no exten- 
sion as to persons reached; the schools were simply Sun- 
day schools meeting in the week. We have abandoned 
the church-school extension plan and are now coming to 
think of week-day instruction in terms of the community, 
not only that all the children of the community may be 
reached but that we have here what may be a community 
enterprise. The two current general ideals have been 
well presented in two recent books. Dr. B. S. Winches- 
ter has presented the argument for one method,^ the fed- 
eration of the churches in a community so as to provide 
and conduct a school or schools, meeting during the week 
and giving religious instruction. Prof. W. S. Athearn 

1 In " Religious Education and Democracy," a report presented 
to The Federal Council of Churches in America, Dec, 1916, published 
in book form by the Abingdon Press, 1917. 



A COMMUNITY PROGRAM 225 

has presented another method/ that of organizing in the 
community a special Council of Religious Education, in- 
dependent of the churches. He has conducted a number 
of enterprises for the training of church-school workers 
under his plan. He especially urges the inability of the 
churches to carry forward common enterprises of an edu- 
cational character. Two things seem to be certain : 
First, that the local federations of churches cannot meet 
the needs of the communities in religious training; they 
have, usually, no developed educational expertness ; they 
represent only certain sections of organized religion in 
a community, and they have, as yet, no programs for re- 
ligious education. Second, a community enterprise in 
religious training must have the leadership of its churches. 
It cannot be conducted independently of them ; to attempt 
this is to ignore the basic principle of using the natural 
existing social groups ; it is to create another religious 
agency and to attempt to separate the churches from their 
most important task, the training of the young. 

Do we then stand at an impasse; the churches cannot 
do this work and no one else ought to do it.f^ Not at all. 
First, we have been confounding two parts of this enter- 
prise, the function of the church to train all its young 
lives and the function of the community to make it pos- 
sible for every life to receive religious training. The 
churches cannot leave to the community responsibility 
for instruction ; the community cannot leave to the 
churches its responsibility for conditions and social or- 
ganization favorable to instruction. Second, we are con- 
fused because we are still thinking of a Sunday school 
magnified into a week-day affair while we ought to go on 
to think of the community accepting its responsibility for 
the whole of life, making provision in plant and program 

1 In " Religious Education and American Democracy," Pilgrim 
Press, 1917. 



n6 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

for all, while the churches accept the challenge of the 
community, enter into the program, use the plant and 
discharge the duty which is specifically committed to them. 

Where the community council is alive to the religious 
needs of life, to the place of the spiritual, it will be quick 
to furnish the plant and equipment for instruction. 
Where the churches are alive to their real work they will 
be able to forget differences and to work together in the 
use of the community plant. The important thing to do 
is to develop a sense of community responsibility parallel 
in this field to that which is now felt for general educa- 
tion. 

To be specific, we are recommending that when the 
Community Council has been organized, representing all 
the churches and higher interests, it begins to provide 
suitable buildings which can be used all through the week 
for instruction in religion and for such training as the 
churches may desire to give. Common provision for 
school plants would involve a community-organized pro- 
gram but it would not at all involve community control 
of teaching. Each church would be as free as ever in 
this respect. The community has no more dictation over 
the teaching of any church in its common building than 
it had when it provided separate buildings. Just as the 
community in furnishing common facilities of communi- 
cation in the streets cannot dictate our motives in walk- 
ing but leaves us free so long as we respect the social 
rights of others, so in the community school of religion 
there would be freedom under social obligations. 

It is not at all inconceivable that the community shall 
do three things : recognizing the child's need it shall so 
arrange its general time-schedule that all the young may 
have opportunity for religious instruction and training; 
next, provide the necessary facilities which shall be at 
the disposal of all, and, then, use its existing educational 
agencies, or, if necessary, provide others to give the 



A COMMUNITY PROGRAM 227 

proper technical training to those who are to instruct the 
young. 

The time-schedule is no small part of the problem 
everywhere. The curriculum of the school has been so 
enlarged and its field of activities so extended that young 
people are likely to find every hour occupied with either 
school-work, home-work, school-supervised recreation or 
the school's social life. Now no single aspect of life ought 
to monopolize the child's program. Yet there are chil- 
dren who for five days from rising to sleeping have a 
schedule of nothing but school work. They are entitled 
to time for the free life of the family, for their own social 
groups, for the life of the spirit. The coordination and 
adjustment of the now overlapping and competing parts 
of a time program will be one of the first problems for 
the community council. It is quite possible for a neigh- 
borhood to come to an agreement that certain hours be- 
long to certain plans, to end the present wild competition 
for youth's leisure and to arrange and carry out a pro- 
gram which would leave no empty hours and none in which 
a dozen agencies distract our energies. 

A COMMUNITY BUILDING FOR RELIGION 

The matter of provision of facilities is not a difficult 
one. We already have community schools everywhere, 
and, in many places, community parks, recreation grounds, 
concert and lecture halls and film theatres. Is it im- 
possible to have a building with the necessary class rooms 
and meeting places which any religious body shall be free 
to use for purposes of instruction? Such a building 
ought to be the voluntary enterprise of the community, 
neither erected nor supported by taxation. None should 
be forced to pay ; the compulsion should be that of the 
democratic conscience. It would be erected and main- 
tained by the community council by funds freely con- 
tributed. The building need not be as large as the public 



228 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

school because it need not receive all the children at any 
one time. If, for the sake of illustration, we agree that 
the time spent in classes in religion should be related to 
time spent in general education as one is to six then the 
community religious plant could have approximately one- 
sixth of the pupil accommodations needed in the other 
school. Some latitude would be necessary for maintain- 
ing a larger number of classes proportionately, while the 
ratio would depend on whether the public school had 
proper, modem facilities. But probably all the children 
in a sixteen-room building in the public schools could pass 
through four periods each a week in a four-room school 
of religion. This must not leave the impression that the 
only or the principal activity of the community school 
of religion will be instruction : classes may not be nearly 
as important as directed activities. 

Programs would be arranged by agreement so that the 
facilities of the building would be in use practically all 
the time. The building could be used for many com- 
munity purposes, such as night-classes, lectures, social 
gatherings, community dances, community sewing and re- 
lief work. Naturally it would be the home of the com- 
munity center, the plant from which all its work would 
be carried on. It would stand in the community the cen- 
ter of its life of spiritual purpose as the public school 
stands the center of its life of intellectual purpose; but 
the two purposes would never be separated. 

The need for a plant of this kind needs no emphasis, 
not only because of the inadequacy of church edifices for 
instructional purposes but from the present dispersion 
of the many activities of the community which should 
find a home here. The public school has opened its doors 
to the community center; in many places it will long be 
the center of neighborhood activities, but it has not been 
planned for the type of work advocated here ; it is free 
only in the evening hours and often it finds community 



A COMMUNITY PROGRAM 229 

service an embarrassing guest. The community needs a 
special plant and, in securing the religious educational 
building, could design it with reference to the larger 
needs of the center and the cooperative work of the com- 
munity. 

Will the churches find it possible to agree in the use of 
a community educational building? If religion cannot 
exercise social coordination it needs conversion. But 
churches are agreeing to the common use of plants, even 
to using them for preaching and services of worship. In 
the instance proposed they know they would be the losers 
unless they could fit into the community plan. Indeed 
such a plan might prove to be a means of religious edu- 
cation to some churches. It would force them to look 
beyond their own groups ; it would make them conscious 
of all the children of the community and of other forces 
working therein; it would compel cooperation. It would 
be a simple but signal step toward that unity of purpose 
for which all long. 

This plan does not assume that only the so-called evan- 
gelical churches, or only the Protestant churches, or even 
only the Christian churches would have a share in the use 
of the building proposed. The community cannot distin- 
guish. It is responsible for the success of no particular 
group, but for the success of every group making good 
citizens. Its attitude should be the same to one as to 
another. Nor does any church in using this building 
sacrifice or attenuate its own faith. It simply respects 
the civil rights which all hold in a democracy and the 
consequent social obligations of respect which each must 
have for all others. It accepts the cooperation of the 
community in the discharge of those special responsibili- 
ties which it has in regard to the instruction of its own 
youth. 

Religious cooperation is much nearer than we some- 
times think. The old rancors and feuds lie in our mem- 



230 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

ory more than in the hearts of religious leaders to-day. 
Perhaps churches assume a bellicose attitude toward one 
another because that is what we expect them to do. 
Groups are more likely to find cooperation possible in 
large enterprises than in trifling ones. In our new spirit 
of social unity in the face of great world problems there 
ought to be found the possibility of a cooperative spirit 
sufficient to make the community school ecclesiastically 
feasible. 

Provision for technical training of workers in religious 
education in the community school is not predicated en- 
tirely on the present program which calls once a week for 
a large number of unskilled workers. Given the com- 
munity plant and program, with the work of the school 
scheduled through the week, fewer workers will be needed 
by each church and it will be possible to use those who 
have had expert training and who are professionally em- 
ployed. But, just as we ought to have, in every com- 
munity, provision for the continuous training, the inspi- 
ration and professional development of public-school 
teachers, so we will need provision for the educational 
nurture of the staff of the proposed school. This task 
the community may attempt directly, for no creedal or 
sectarian differences enter into the science of education. 
No city would step beyond its proper province if it should 
provide a course of lectures or arrange a regular cur- 
riculum of classes for those who desired to learn how to 
guide the development of children in religious character. 
The principles of education would be the same for all 
teachers whatever church they might support, and the 
principles of ideal development would hold even for those 
who cared for none at all. 

It is too early to attempt all the details of this plan,^ 

1 For a survey of experiments of this type see the various pub- 
lications of The Religious Education Association, and, for a succinct 
outline. Bulletin No. 13, Week-Day Religious Education, free, from 
The American Baptist Publication Society. 



A COMMUNITY PROGRAM 231 

and one must remember Portia's words on the relative 
ease of telling how it were done compared with doing it, 
but certain it is that it never will be done unless we enter- 
tain the vision and make the attempt. The principal is- 
sue is that we shall recognize the responsibility of the 
entire community for the development of the spiritual life 
of all its people. Then we shall apply this principle at 
the point where application is now most feasible, and also 
most important, at that of training the young. We shall 
seek to move as united, cooperating communities and we 
shall expect all formal plans and mechanisms to grow out 
of the ideal of the organization of the entire life of the 
community for the purpose of developing spiritually 
minded citizens. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

THE FUNCTION OF A COLLEGE IN A DEMOCRACY 

Democracy constantly seeks the improvement of the 
type of life ; it is not blind to the biological law that the 
higher the type the longer its period of development. A 
fly reaches maturity in a few hours ; man allows his young 
many years and increasingly realizes that life itself is too 
short to attain full, all-round maturity. And civilization, 
that is man organized as society, sets aside ever length- 
ening periods for the preparation of youth for its life. 
The college and university are our modern extensions of 
the formal periods of youth's preparation. 

Democracy extends the period of infancy. Because de- 
mocracy exists that lives may develop it not only sets 
about those lives many forms of protection in their early 
stages of dependence but it extends the time in which 
development is fostered by society. The rapid develop- 
ment of colleges, their articulation with systems of public 
instruction and the increase in the proportions of the 
population receiving higher education all point to the 
ideal of democracy, a condition under which all persons 
shall be free to receive formal training through the entire 
period of youth. This does not imply that all will re- 
ceive the entire curriculum of the typical college; it does 
imply that society will provide for all youth training de- 
signed according to their needs. The college is one of 
democracy's mechanisms for directing personal develop- 
ment. 

Democracy expects that this e?xtension of training shall 

be for the enriching of its e'ntire life. It expects that 

those who are trained will become servants; it hopes for 

232 



THE FUNCTION OF A COLLEGE 233 

three experiences : the development of the powers of indi- 
viduals, their social awakening, adjustment and efficiency 
and the discovery of a social motive in the meaning of 
life. College life is more than an extension of the fields 
of learning; it is an experience in new ways of living. It 
affords a life under special stimuli and advantages. It 
affords freedom for the development of powers at the 
time when social consciousness is growing, when ideals are 
most potent. It should result in a life controlled by 
ideals and devoted to democracy's purposes. 

How can the college develop tlie motives and form the 
ideals of democracy? The college is the home of social 
idealism. A large number of instructors are democratic 
idealists. Its courses in social sciences are often regarded 
as dangerous by those whose interests demand the preser- 
vation of ancient forms of social injustice or who would 
hold society in status quo so that they might continue 
its exploitation. The principles and the methods of 
democratic living are both taught in college. Campus life 
is often a high demonstration of very simple democracy 
and frequently enduring social motives come to youth 
through this experience. All that is needed is to bring 
the social idealism of the college to its logical complete- 
ness, to see and apply it as a plan of life and to develop 
the motives and emotions sufficient to carry it over into 
life. For the purposes of democracy the social idealism 
of the college must be vitalized into action and unified 
under the ideals and habits of the life of love and service. 
College life must become a spiritual experience in devotion 
to democracy. 

The college student needs not alone to know the mech- 
anism of democracy, nor alone to see its ideals, but, also, 
to acquire its motives. The problem of higher education 
is less one of information than of motivation. How can 
we be sure that these young men and women, the social 
leaders of to-morrow, will retain their ideals, will return 



234 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

to us fully willing to pay the price of democracy, so satis- 
fied of its high ends that to them the life of devotion to 
the good of all will be the only reasonable and possible 
life? 

The training of the spirit is the central purpose of the 
college in its service for democracy. Here we have a spe- 
cial application of the principle that, in view of the spir- 
itual aims of a democracy and the spiritual demands it 
makes on people, its first need is that of religious educa- 
tion. Nowhere is that training more needed than in the 
years of the extension of education in the college. Yet 
this is the aspect of life which the colleges have most neg- 
lected. Young people graduate alert, fairly intelligent, 
enthusiastic and idealistic, yet without consciousness of 
the religious meaning and motif of life. Their idealism 
does not carry over into the practice of democracy. 
They have converted industry to scientific methods much 
more successfully than they have converted society to 
democracy. They are not especially marked as a class 
in leadership in social service and progress. Is this not 
because the college leaves social training incomplete? It 
does not treat social studies as dealing with a mode of 
life and a faith for society. It gives youth a vision of so- 
ciety reorganized, but it fails to connect the program 
of reorganization to those ideals, devotions and activities 
which constitute the motives of life to the young. It does 
not connect their faith with a program of service. 

Yet the college years are peculiarly those in which train- 
ing for democracy must involve a religious experience. 
They are the years in which life gets its bent, in which 
men acquire motives deep enough to hold when the lesser 
prizes promise so much, the years when we establish hab- 
its of devotion to ends which are ideal but which no cold 
reasoning can ever take from us. They are the years 
of opportunity for true teachers to help youth discover 
life's meaning in terms of its highest values and life's 



THE FUNCTION OF A COLLEGE 235 

method as devotion to the realization of those values in 
the lives of all. If the college fails to do this it may be 
a great instructional agency but it is not an educational 
one; it is mistaking extension for elevation. It must re- 
veal the spiritual nature and the social method of de- 
mocracy or it is not carrying out its part in extending 
the period of life training for the young. It has to de- 
velop the lives of persons for social ends and these ends 
involve motives that must be based on spiritual meanings 
in life. The primary responsibility of the college lies, 
then, in the field of religious training. 

THE COLLEGES AND RELIGION 

Historically the American college grew out of religious 
convictions. The first colleges were organized by reli- 
gious persons for religious purposes. Their charters fre- 
quently expressly stated those purposes. The early col- 
leges were poor in money, limited in curricula and small 
in enrollment, but they were mighty in one respect, they 
stamped the leadership of America with idealism. To- 
day the colleges are rich, with widely inclusive curricula 
and with immense bodies of students — and one of the 
practical, puzzling questions of their executives is. What 
is the place of religion in the college? Here is a change 
that is at least worthy of consideration. How has it hap- 
pened that religion, once central to the life and purpose, 
now holds a debatable position? 

The widening of the field has made religion less con- 
sciously focal. The early college sought only to prepare 
leadership for the field of religion ; the modern college pre- 
pares leaders for every field. Meanwhile there has been 
an extension of the fields of leadership. Two hundred 
years ago the ministry was the one great profession, 
easily above all others in social distinction, commonly 
above the others, as law and medicine, in intellectual prep- 
aration. Then the parson was the person in each com- 



236 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

munity. We have not lowered the intellectual demands 
for the ministry, but we have raised immensely the stand- 
ards of the other professions. This has been in response 
to a recognition of their developing social responsibilities. 
To-day in each of their fields these professions offer op- 
portunities for the same kind of leadership that once 
belonged exclusively to the minister. This enlargement 
the college has recognized and has, therefore, sought to 
provide general training for all who might hold leader- 
ship in any field. It has ceased to be a school for reli- 
gious workers and has become a school for all leaders. 

But this is not all. Democracy strikes out beyond 
the concept of a selected group of leaders. It is not con- 
tent to think that there should be peculiar opportunities 
reserved for a few. Whatever aids men in the develop- 
ment of powers of leadership is the inalienable right of 
every man. The college has followed the logic of de- 
mocracy in offering to every one those opportunities which 
once were reserved for a few. It has led the way in 
democratizing higher education. Now it needs to take 
the next steps, of making its method democratic and its 
message such as democracy needs to-day. 

No one can fail to see that the extension of the field 
of the college has taken from it an easily apprehended 
religious character ; but it is a question whether it has 
not, at the same time, developed its religious quality. 
No single statement will cover all cases. There are col- 
leges in which the total emphasis and impress is decidedly 
religious, in the sense here insisted on, to a degree that 
we believe was not surpassed in any of the earlier institu- 
tions. But there are others in which, even though they 
bear ecclesiastical names, it would be difficult to discover 
even so much as a reminder of religion. Speaking gen- 
erally, the extension of the field of the college has not 
operated to attenuate its religious influence but it has 



THE FUNCTION OF A COLLEGE 237 

markedly reduced the place of religion in the curriculum 
and in college activities. 

More elaborate organization has obscured religious 
'purpose. The change has been due in part to the transi- 
tion from personal leadership to academic organization. 
There cluster about the earlier colleges the memories of 
great personages, chosen to their positions because of 
religious qualities. The modern college does not depend 
on the over-shadowing personality of any individual, nor 
does it choose its head for the earlier reasons. Com- 
monly it counts on an aggregation of scholarly powers, on 
the total impress of a learned faculty, on high standards 
and ample facilities and on the organizing power of an 
executive. It was the outstanding, personal, religious 
figure that drew men to early Princeton, Harvard, and 
Yale and to many smaller schools. Their presidents were 
great men and pronounced religious leaders. Since the 
special field of the college, then, was religion the academic 
leaders were those who towered above their fellows in 
religious knowledge and religious life. Our modern lead- 
ership is just as likely to rise in any other field, in 
physics or economics. 

Changes in curriculum have affected the place of re- 
ligion. The principal change has been that which has 
taken place as the college has moved from a school of 
preparation for the ministry, a simple theological sem- 
inary, to take its place in general culture. Since reli- 
gious studies were included on professional grounds they 
have been dropped because their relation to the life-needs 
of students have no longer been clearly evident. Studies 
in religion have only formed the vanguard of a long pro- 
cession retreating from the campus under the exigencies 
of the practical demands of the age. Moreover, religion 
has often been held back while other studies have gone 
forward. Has there been any change in the method and 



238 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

content of teaching In religion which would in any degree 
correspond to the changes in the teaching of chemistry, 
for example, in the last century? Or, to take a closer 
analogy, consider the development in the teaching of lit- 
erature. Progress has been made in religion ; in instances 
one feels that it compares favorably with any other de- 
partment in college. At least this is true as to the teach- 
ing of one aspect of the subject, its literature and his- 
tory, and here the results have been such as to indicate 
a solution of the whole problem. 

Democracy has clarified and elevated the purpose of 
the college. The tendency of a true democracy will be to 
regard all human affairs with spiritual vision and to think 
of all life in religious terms. Its high purposes with per- 
sons in society converts all social life into a spiritual 
enterprise. Therefore it regards all forms of social lead- 
ership with the same reverence that our fathers felt for 
the ministry and the leadership of the churches. It feels 
responsible for every form of leadership, since in every 
department of life we need both the same expertness and 
the same spirit that the early colleges were designed to 
give to the ministry. The modern college discharges a 
spiritual responsibility in all fields, giving not only intel- 
lectual training but, what is vastly more important, vision 
of the meaning and motive of life and leadership in a de- 
mocracy. The purpose of the college to-day is to serve 
democracy, this kingdom of the spirit, through all its 
leaders just as the early college sought to serve through 
a few. So that, even though religion may seem to hold 
a debatable place in the curriculum, it is possible to think 
of the college as distinctly a religious agency. In so far 
as it makes life in a democracy mean fullness of living, 
fullness of service and devotion to the fullness of life for 
all, it serves religion. 

The spiritual function makes the college a religious in- 
stitution. It is folly to talk of training leaders unless we 



THE FUNCTION OF A COLLEGE 239 

hold ourselves responsible for leaderships, for the vision, 
motive and ideal that must lead the leaders. The prime 
quality of leadership is spiritual ; power to lead is a mat- 
ter of the spirit. Faith is the leader's loyalty to an ideal 
that compels him to step forward in untrodden paths, to 
attempt the unprecedented, to follow the vision wherever 
it may lead. Faith is that loyalty to truth thai trans- 
lates its concepts into action and makes them the common 
possession of the world. Religion is the life based on its 
faith; it makes men live for the abiding values. It re- 
veals the only possessions a person, as a person, can 
have and the only ones he can share unreservedly with all 
others. It makes the leader's life possible ; it furnishes 
him his food for desert days, his sources of strength for 
all tasks. These are the needs of men, the demands of 
their inner life, which any institution of leadership must 
enable them to possess. 

The college needs a new interpretation of its 'problem 
of religion, a setting in terms of a democracy of the spirit. 
Whenever the matter of religion in the American college 
is discussed four focal points appear; they are: courses, 
worship, voluntary activities and local churches. These 
seem to limit the vision of religion's function in higher 
educational institutions. It is assumed that the problem 
is to be solved by one or the other of these means. The 
emphasis shifts from time to time ; not long ago it was 
almost wholly on services of worship, later it passed to 
voluntary classes and activities ; to-day it is on courses 
of study. These various devices indicate a failure to face 
the full problem ; they are attempts to meet special phases 
as they appear. 

If the college could discharge its whole duty toward 
learning by its courses in a prescribed series of subjects 
it might, conceivably, discharge its religious duty by 
courses in religious knowledge. But the college does not 
think that its work is done when a body of knowledge 



mo EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

has been tested and found not wholly wanting in the 
student's mind. By directed activities it develops habits 
and powers ; by ideals expressed in buildings, in forms of 
art, in the characters and habits of persons, by its whole 
life it seeks to cultivate habits of mind, to lead youth to 
certain levels of living and into certain power. It recog- 
nizes a responsibility toward life, toward persons and 
toward society. Its courses are means and not ends. So 
should it be in the matter of religion. 

The college discharges its spiritual function hy furnish- 
ing an experience in religion. We are in danger of re- 
peating with the college student the mistake we have made 
in the religious education of children in the church school, 
that of assuming that the problem was simply one of 
providing the materials of religious knowledge. Almost 
exclusively current discussions on religion in the college 
center on courses in the Bible and other religious subjects. 
At first this was natural as an attempt to restore these 
subjects to the area of the student's academic interests; 
the prevailing exclusion of religion was so striking an 
anomaly as to call for protest. But no one seriously 
supposes that the introduction of these subjects would of 
itself secure the ends of religious education. That cannot 
be, first, because there is no assurance that religious re- 
sults flow from the academic study of religion, and, sec- 
ond, college class-work does not have any marked tend- 
ency to carry over into action and immediate living ; on 
the contrary it often tends to place the subject in the 
category of so-called purely intellectual interests. Col- 
lege Bible study can easily mean placing the Bible on a 
mental academic shelf. 

It is worth while to have clearly in mind the end that 
is sought. We assume that the college is a religious in- 
stitution in that it was organized by religious persons 
and is being conducted as a part of a program which 
Jooks toTvard a religious social order. Its function is to 



THE FUNCTION OF A COLLEGE 241 

give society trained persons, developed in their general 
powers, who will become effective leaders in developing a 
religious social order. The end, then, looks far beyond 
any body of knowledge ; it is directed immediately to the 
lives and conduct of persons and ultimately to society. 
It implies habits of mind, habits of conduct, ideals and 
abilities. Now this must not be conceived simply as a 
matter of training for an experience into which the 
student will enter later ; there is no such thing as a separa- 
tion between training and the experience for which it is 
designed ; the experience is the training. If these young 
men and women are to make a religious world, they must 
live in one now. Modern education assures us that this is 
the right emphasis, that all schooling is really a partici- 
pation in life in which the doctrines are discovered through 
doing. 

The great need of the college student is the opportimity 
to experience religion as the normal life of his own society. 
The very fact of going to college and of doing its work, 
living its life may express his ideals and his faith, may 
be his religious experience. The college may say to him, 
" To be here and to do well your work is the highest re- 
ligious life you can live now." If he can see that, it will 
make religion much more real than it could be as a matter 
of historical or philosophical inquiry. It will make it a 
matter of the present, of the daily life of campus, of class 
room and of comradeship. College living may be an ex- 
perience in religion when it is saturated with ideals of 
worth and service. 

Religion must he first of all a positive active experience. 
It will rise in the wills of men and find ways out through 
their actions before it will be a reality in their thinking. 
It will come out of their own aspirations rather than from 
overhead authorities. It will not come out of abstract 
thinking. But finding itself in the concrete, in action, 
it will be saved from the purely speculative attitude. One 



242 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

of the dangers of student life is a negative critical atti- 
tude toward all things ; this may be only an assumed 
attitude, but it easily leads men into thinking that criti- 
cizing the game from the bleachers is the same as playing 
the game on the field. It tends to satisfy with an analysis 
instead of an experience and to substitute a definition for 
the deed. Thinking about religion is not necessarily re- 
ligious; the academic habit develops the critic who never 
creates. It helps to account for the failure of college 
men and women to take an active part in the work of the 
churches. The common rejoinder that the work of the 
church is not worthy of their attention is simply a fur- 
ther indication of this critical attitude, for, to trained 
men and women, the deficiencies of an institution ought 
to be an invitation to the enlistment of their services. 

If the records of college graduates are examined it is 
usually found that whenever they devote themselves to 
social service it is to those forms in which they had some 
experience while in college. Whenever service stepped out 
of books into the student's activities it became his per- 
manent possession. College politics have been a school of 
political service. But the college relation to philanthropy 
is almost entirely bookish, with the result that it does not 
carry over into after-life. So long as college religion is 
purely a bookish aff*air the same will be true here. The 
intellectual aspects will be the only vital ones in the col- 
lege period. On this plane the actualities of everyday 
religious life have no chance; the preaching in the home 
church cannot compare with college chapel, the teaching 
cannot hold a candle to college class work, the level of 
intelligence in the pra3^er meeting will remind only by 
extreme contrast with the groups in college. But this is 
not the plane of reality ; on the level of life and action 
the village church will be able to take care of itself and, 
on this level, college training will carry over into after- 
life experience. The student who has had experience in 



THE FUNCTION OF A COLLEGE MS 

religion as service in his college days will find ample scope 
for exercise later. 

Of course all this is only another way of saying that 
in the college religion is one of the subjects for which a 
laboratory is indispensable, and that the laboratory is 
that of the college life and its avenues of service. 

BIBLE STUDY IN COLLEGE 

What is the place of Bible study? Does a program of 
the character suggested involve the abandonment of col- 
lege courses in the history and literature of the Bible .'^ 
Have we, then, been developing so many efficient depart- 
ments of the Bible, and of Religion, only to find them 
useless? Not at all; courses in religion have their place, 
an essential and important one. But they are only a part 
of a program of religious training. They have the same 
relations here as in other departments. 

Courses in the Bible belong in the college, first, on the 
same ground as courses in any ancient literature, because 
it is part of our spiritual heritage. But the Hebrew and 
Christian scriptures are part of our heritage in a pecu- 
liarly distinct and valuable degree. They have entered, 
more than any other, into our thinking, they determine 
our ideals, they mold our current philosophy and they 
are so much a part of our every-day speech that it is im- 
possible to understand the language of our times without 
some knowledge of the Bible. It has guided our institu- 
tions and saturated our literature. Every teacher of 
English knows the difficulties that arise through popular 
ignorance of this well of English undefiled. This has been 
so often stated that we accept the fact complacently to- 
day. And yet we can hardly claim that any youth has 
had a fair chance to possess his world from whom this 
part of it has been held back. 

Second, biblical courses have their places in social 
studies. The college years are peculiarly suitable for the 



244 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

study of the Bible ; the mind is then ready to take the 
historical point of view. While it would seem that much 
of the general knowledge of the Bible which seems so la- 
mentably lacking in the college ought to have been ac- 
quired in earlier years, the greater wealth of this litera- 
ture is not within the appreciation of children. But in 
college it is possible to trace the rise and development 
of moral ideals and social-religious institutions, to trace 
religion in its development and to see the inter-action be- 
tween social life and spiritual ideals. These are studies 
in moral evolution, in the development of social ideals 
which should precede any study of our own times. 

Third, biblical courses have values of leadership. With 
the historical background there appear the great charac- 
ters, men who are ideals personified, who sweep on the 
stage of time majestically, thrilling and persuading us, 
compelling our heroic worship. Youth needs to know 
them. They are the very soul of literature, for what is 
literature but a social experience with the great? To live 
an hour with them may change a life. Biblical courses 
belong in the college because they may minister to its 
spiritual purposes. 

The spiritual purpose of the college in a democracy is, 
then, first of all, one that cannot be readily exhibited in 
catalogues. It implies the saturation of the college pro- 
gram as a whole with spiritual purpose. It means that 
the college is conceived as a religious institution, and that 
all its work looks forward, with religious purpose, to a 
spiritual world order. 



CHAPTER XIX 

TEACHING RELIGION IN THE COLLEGE 

It is not difficult to understand the spiritual mission of 
a college in a democracy ; but for the college worker, the 
immediate problem is to see how the spiritual power and 
purpose of a college may be definitely precipitated in a 
college program. In that problem are several elements 
which may be stated briefly: 

The college is no longer classified as a religious insti- 
tution. A religious purpose is no longer taken for 
granted. The change from professional training for re- 
ligious work to one embracing all general culture grad- 
ually stripped from the college its special theological 
character. Being divorced from religion on a vocational 
basis it has not been easy to maintain relations on a basis 
of cultural interest and human need. 

Civil relationships have limited religious freedom. The 
relations of colleges to the states, as through endowments 
and support, at first had no effect on religious teaching. 
But, as the United States became the home of many faiths 
and questions of conscience rights arose, the day passed 
when the state could support a single faith. One of two 
things happened to the colleges in most instances ; either 
they became state institutions, disavowing all sectarian 
connections and any special religious purpose, or they 
ceased to accept the support of the state and were free 
to teach religion. In either case, however, the status of 
religion had been affected. In the case of the State Uni- 
versities great care is always exercised to avoid even the 

appearance of sectarianism. In a few instances this is 

245 



246 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

carried to the extreme in the refusal to recognize even the 
fact of religion. In any case their strictly non-sectarian 
policy makes the recognition of religion, which usually ap- 
pears in the form of some particular faith, quite difficult, 
and this tends constantly to modify their academic prac- 
tice. The leadership of the state university affects all the 
colleges of a state and, without knowing just why, they 
are likely to follow the path marked out by this institu- 
tion, a path determined by many considerations which 
do not affect the greater number of smaller or more free 
institutions. The free colleges have failed often to see 
and to use their freedom. 

Church relationships have limited religion. Many 
church colleges have serious difficulties with ecclesiastical 
control. If the churches determine the content of the re- 
ligious teaching of a college it loses its spiritual leader- 
ship. It becomes simply an echo, its notes determined by 
voices speaking in the past. That condition is much more 
common than we are apt to confess. There are colleges 
which never have a free thought ; every word and act is 
determined by one of two considerations — often by both, 
by the desire to stand well with the churches and the fear 
of offending the patron who has sinned against human 
rights. In such institutions the fear of the brebhren 
exercises the spell of a general inhibition in the class 
rooms, especially those in biology, philosophy and eco- 
nomics. Here two grim shadows haunt the executive, the 
loss of financial support and a heresy trial. This is not 
a general picture; but it is so sad and striking in the 
instances where it is true that one cannot escape from 
its horror. Religion cannot breathe in an atmosphere 
such as that ; that college is not a prophetic voice ; it is a 
hireling, peddling the petty wares made in darkness. 

Last, the introduction of pre-vocational studies has 
complicated the situation. The question arises. Shall re- 
ligious studies be confined to the pre-vocational purpose. 



TEACHING RELIGION IN THE COLLEGE S47 

designed for those looking forward to a religious profes- 
sion? And, in any case, how difficult it is to place reli- 
gious studies in any other category seeing that religious 
knowledge has been systematized on a vocational basis, by 
colleges preparing for the ministry and by theological 
teachers. 

What is the way hack? The college is a religious in- 
stitution ; religion has a place in the life-training of all 
men and women ; the world properly looks for religious 
persons as a result of higher education, and the college 
has neither time nor a program for religion. The first 
step will be to distinguish between two sets of problems, 
first, to determine the function of religion, in its various 
aspects, in the process of the college, and, second, to se- 
lect the necessary elements and means, rejecting, electing 
and coordinating the traditional religious parts of the 
college curriculum. Many are still attempting to fit the 
theological curriculum inherited from an institution de- 
signed to train ministers into an organization which has 
outgrown that purpose and passed it on to a specialized 
institution. Of course it is true that to a large extent 
the program of the college is determined by custom rather 
than by function; much remains by the sanction of the 
yesterdays alone. In the field of religion, where the hand 
of the past has been absolute, is the finest place to estab- 
lish the practice of a thorough examination of purpose 
as predicatory to any program. Such an examination 
involves a study of the precise social function of a college ; 
that is too large a task to attempt here, but it seems worth 
while to consider briefly the part of religion in that social 
function. 

COLLEGE PROGRAM OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

The program of religious education in the college will 
have three principal elements : the discovery of a reli- 
gious interpretation of life, training in the habits of the 



U8 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

religious life, and the development of efficiencies in reli- 
gious social realization and self-expression. 

First, the discovery of a religious interpretation of life. 
It is an axiom of everyday thinking that the college fails, 
no matter what else it may accomplish, if it has not en- 
abled the student to get a grasp on life's meaning. Of 
course this is not done either by chapel talks or by any 
sort of dissertations on the subject. It is accomplished 
commonly indirectly, by establishing habits of thought, 
by developing interest in the great subjects of human 
philosophy, by stimulating thoughtful minds one with an- 
other, and by the vision caught through ideal persons, 
purposes and concepts either met at first hand or discov- 
ered in history, literature, science and, most of all, in ex- 
perience. 

Such a conscious purpose makes the academic respon- 
sibility primarily a spiritual one. The most helpful for- 
ward step in religious education in the colleges would be 
the awakening of the staff to consciousness of responsi- 
bility for ideals. That would mean setting first things 
first. It would not mean the abandonment of any aca- 
demic standards, the lowering of any professional ideals 
nor the attempt to make a college a compromise between a 
university and a prayer meeting. Rather a sense of re- 
sponsibility for the ideals of students will make the most 
exacting demands on professional duty and professional 
skill. But the college professor must see that even his 
all-absorbing and all-important specialty is but a means 
to an end, and that end is personal, social and spiritual. 
He is a teacher not of subjects but of persons. His suc- 
cess will be measured not by monographs but by men. 

Whenever this responsibility is active in the staff it will 
be keenly felt in the student body ; its existence will be 
more effective than any homilies on the subject could be. 
Like all great ideals it will be caught and each genera- 
tion of students will hand it down to another. Do we not 



TEACHING RELIGION IN THE COLLEGE 249 

know colleges where this is true, where, high though the 
standards of scholarship are, the greatest heritage of all 
has been that of high and splendid lives who have accus- 
tomed men to thinking worthily of life? 

Students are aided to their interpretation of life in 
many specific ways ; perhaps at no point does a more 
specific evaluation appear than in the choice of vocation. 
This commonly takes place, for those who have higher edu- 
cation, during the college years. It is influenced tre- 
mendously by the traditions of the institution but even 
more by the opinions of instructors or professors. Not 
only are opportunities sedulously cultivated by older 
students to secure the professor's opinions on the profes- 
sions but they watch and repeat his less formal judgments. 
Their choices are fundamentally based on theories, thus 
acquired, of what is most worth while. They choose the 
law, for example, because it offers one an opportunity 
to lead and serve his fellows, because it promises fair 
financial returns with large opportunities for a few — 
of whom the student is one, — or because it offers a digni- 
fied profession with some scholarly aspects. The reason 
for choice is really an evaluation of life. The basis of 
choice is gradually developing through the years before 
it is determined. It is a way of thinking determined by 
the example of parents, the tone of public opinion and, 
markedly, by the attitude and judgments of teachers. So 
that vocational direction has a marked influence in form- 
ing the student's ideals and his theory of the meaning of 
life. 

Every study is likely to have open avenues to life's 
meaning. The study of the Bible is an excellent example, 
but what is true here is just as likely to be true elsewhere 
when the life purpose is held in mind. Where the study 
of the Bible is more than mere pedantry it determines 
one's ideals by revealing great spirits. It does more than 
instruct in the geography, history and archaeology of a 



250 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

remote people; it develops these fields only to form the 
life-setting of great souls, of those who found life as a 
way to God. No one can really study the Bible without 
feeling the reality of those impressive personalities, and 
no one can know them without learning something of their 
secret of life. But there have been great souls in every 
field of human knowledge. History is dead information 
without its spiritual heroes and its compelling motives, 
science is dead without some vision of the vigor and faith 
of Kepler, Cuvier and Huxley, literature without Dante, 
Milton and Homer, politics without Plato, Mazzini and 
Burke. It is not learning only to know what they did 
but to know them, and this is to know what life is. 

INTERPRETING EXPERIENCE IN SPIRITUAL TERMS 

The college aids students to know the meaning of life 
by directing their experience. This is the application in 
the college of the method now accepted as a fundamental 
principle in religious training. But the difficulty is to 
see just how experience may be organized and directed. 
Yet the situation is very simple if we put it into other 
terms and ask. Is it possible to take the life of the college 
as a religious life, to lead young people into its full 
meaning, so that they will freely and happily live this life, 
and then to make them see that in so living they have had 
a religious experience .? Our task is not so much to give 
them something new as to aid them to a right interpreta- 
tion of the life that is already theirs. They must come 
to know the spiritual possibilities of the present. They 
come to college thinking of religion as something sep- 
arated from everyday life. To them the religious people 
were a separate group. They need aid in realizing their 
place in a religious order, in apprehending the normality 
of the religious and in recognizing the religious quality 
in acts and ideals. How is this knowledge to come to 



TEACHING RELIGION IN THE COLLEGE 251 

them? College preachers can help by revealing the spir- 
itual nature of the student's everyday experiences ; teach- 
ers can help by taking religion as a matter belonging 
as normally in life as any other interest, but, most of all, 
this knowledge will filter down through personal contacts, 
through leaders in the student's group. Close friends 
•can take us by the shoulder and say, " Wake up I religion 
is not something apart from you ; it is this life you are 
now living. God is not in the world outside alone ; He is 
in this commonplace round of tasks and joys." 

As a social experience college life may reveal life's spir- 
itual meanings. Friendship is the great revelation of 
life's abiding values, and its extension through the wide 
fellowship of a common society may be simply a mar- 
velous revelation of the possibilities of joy in life. It is 
not strange that graduates look back and say that the 
best of college life was the fellowship ; they are right, for 
this revealed human values, it opened practically the world 
of personality and it was, commonly, an experience in an 
ideal community, one which realized a democracy of the 
spirit, bound in free affection. Often college authorities 
affect to ignore the social life of the campus, to ridicule 
student friendships. But the educators watch these lives 
discovering life, learning that a man's value lies in what 
he is, getting down to the basic terms of a true democracy. 

The second general factor in college religious training 
is the estahlishment of the habits of religious living. 
Habit-formation through the direction and organization 
of experience is one of the normal processes of religious 
education. Surely amongst the desirable habits we will 
place prominently those of affectionate regard for the 
good of all men, full hearted devotion in service to the 
good of all, the control of the powers of one's own life, 
steady and insistent search for truth and reality, sympa- 
thetic adaptation to the needs and even the weaknesses of 



252 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

men, the cooperative mind that can work with others for 
ideal ends and lojalt}^ to our own highest standards. 
These are characteristics of democratic living. 

Such habits are formed by living in these ways and 
doing these things. But how is it possible, in the highly 
mechanized life of the college, to provide for so many and 
varied experiences.? It is not possible if each experience 
is taken by itself. But they do not need to be so taken; 
they do not rise under any special program for they are 
but parts of wider experience. They must be acquired 
as habits, as parts of a variety of activities. Children do 
not acquire the habit of truth-telling by exercises in con- 
sciously telling the truth; it is learned through the prac- 
tice that comes in play, in social relations and in all du- 
ties. Courtesy is not an exercise which can be called for 
ten A. M. on the college program — often it seems to be 
postponed until graduation — but actually it is a habit 
formed by social thoughtfulness at all times. Social serv- 
ice is not that which is reserved for the Social Service 
Club and set on the program to begin after dinner on 
Friday night ; it is that attitude of mind and consequent 
activity which finds expression on the campus and in class 
rooms as well as in the city slums. Thus all college life 
is a school of habits. 

The college is responsible for " college life.^* The de- 
velopment of such habits as have been mentioned cannot 
be left entirely to student initiative any more than the 
habits desired in the elementary school are expected to 
rise in the child's will alone. There is desire there, and 
the power is there, but it needs stimulation and direction. 
" College life," we often say, " is the largest part of edu- 
cation." Why then is this largest part left without di- 
rection.'^ In what sense are college leaders educators if 
they have no care for that which plays the largest part in 
education .^^ When, in the face of high standards of schol- 
arship, slovenly habits of living are permitted, when men 



TEACHING RELIGION IN THE COLLEGE 253 

crowding through class-rooms and halls become discour- 
teous to women, when dormitory life becomes slip-shod 
and dirty, what are the ultimate educational effects? 

It is said that it is beneath the dignity of college pro- 
fessors to give these young people lessons in personal 
cleanliness, courtesy, truth-telling and truth-living. This 
is the rankest kind of childish pedantry. It could be 
maintained only by the dignity of purposeless pride of 
eimdition. It might be true if the college had no respon- 
sibility for the future which is to be determined by the life 
habits of graduates. But, as it is, instead of training in 
living, we exhaust our interest in conduct by leading the 
class in ethics through dry analyses of the bases of group 
beha^dor. If nowhere else, here is an opportunity, in- 
stead of developing an analytic interest in human behavior 
as a remote affair, to fix attention on the problems nearest 
at hand. Why not treat the college life as a real life 
involving real ethical situations. It is very real to the 
student, as real as any world ever will be ; it is his imme- 
diate opportunity of learning the art of living.^ If the 
college is to train for a democratic society it must be 
done by actual training in the arts of social life as they 
must be practiced in the college. 

TRAINING FOR SERVICE 

The third general element is the development of efftcien- 
cies h religious self-expression and social service. Can 
the college impart such instruction and develop such forms 
of exjerience as shall send young men and women out to 
live t\e life of a democratic society, one that calls for de- 
voted and efficient cooperation in the common good? Can 
it adc to the vision of a world organized for spiritual 
ends the abilities to realize that world? This is true vo- 

1 As an example of this method see the excellent text book by 
Profesjor Bernard C. Ewer on " College Study and College Life " 
(Badger, 1917). i 



254 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

cational training, for men are called to that which is 
greater than their professional callings, to serve and en- 
rich their world. The sweeping vision must, however, 
come down to practical details. This is the difficult mat- 
ter ; youth glows with the vision but it easily chills before 
the small tasks that alone can make the vision real. Their 
ardor will certainly die if our preparation is purely theo- 
retical. Here practice must go on step by step ; they 
must be guided into service and their ideals must find 
immediate application and expression in practice. 

The college can train in practical religious usefulness. 
Looking forward to their lives the college must see them 
living in communities where religious enterprises are in 
operation and where they wait for efficient workers. 
Much of this will be work in churches ; this is not to as- 
sume that church-work is the only or the most important 
form of religious service. But it is certainly a very nat- 
ural one with which to begin and it is one which is already 
fairly well organized. It has a broader claim than we 
sometimes think. If the total society is to be governed 
by spiritual ideals we must preserve this smaller society 
which is specifically organized as a spiritual group. If 
the community of to-morow is to be one in which children 
will have their full rights and men may find their measure 
of happiness we must aid those societies which are organ- 
ized for ideal ends to function effectively in society to- 
day. The church needs those who know how to make her 
social force count for social development and righ:ness. 
The college is the one institution which can train for com- 
munities workers capable for this task. 

Such a purpose will lead to courses of instruction and 
to the direction of experience in the actual work ;vhich 
churches have to do. These courses would not lo^k to 
serving an institution ; they simply accept the fact of 
social groups in communities organized for religious 
ends and they seek to train young people to eflcient 



TEACHING RELIGION IN THE COLLEGE 255 

service through these groups. The courses look for- 
ward to lay service ; they have no professional intent. 
Up to the present the application of this principle has 
been largely in the field of the educational work of 
churches. It has developed from the definite plans pro- 
posed by the Religious Education Association.^ It is 
found in chairs of Religious Education, with courses on 
Church-school history, organization, worship, child-psy- 
chology, methods of teaching, materials, community work 
and in the adaptation of biblical courses to this field. An 
excellent beginning has been made which needs no justifi- 
cation so far as its practical value is concerned. 

Sometimes objection is made to practical training on 
the ground that such courses lower college standards, be- 
ing foreign to cultural purposes. Strange to say the col- 
leges that insist most on these cultural standards have not 
hesitated to devote themselves extensively to pre-vocational 
work in the field of general education ; their catalogues 
show their intent to prepare young people for public- 
school service.^ No one objects to this, but all the argu- 
ments that hold for general education as a subject in the 
college curriculum hold for religious education. And so 
far as " culture " is concerned, what is culture but the 
growth of life, and life grows not for itself but for and 
through service. Culture for culture's sake is worse than 
art for art's sake. It is an end that turns inward and 
defeats itself. Culture must have purpose. The higher 
the purpose the greater the reach of the life upward. 
Training in the realization of spiritual ideals through so- 
ciety gives the ideal vigor and reality ; it secures its steady 
development. To deny the student training in the ex- 
pression of spiritual ideals through social activity is to 

1 See the Memorial addressed to the heads of departments of 
education in colleges and universities throughout the United States 
by the Council of the Religious Education Association in 1913, 

2 See the survey by W. S. Athearn in Religious Education for 
Peb., 1916^ Vol. XI, No. 1. 



^56 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

refuse him an essential part of his means of growth, to 
shorten the radius of his graduate experience and, in prac- 
tice, to deny that religion is a real part of life. 

More important then than all courses dealing with the 
theories of religion, as a means of developing men and 
women of religious spirit, the college will recognize the 
necessity of simply accepting religion as a part of life, 
as a real experience in college life and a reality in the life 
which the graduate will live. Then religion can be made 
integral in the student's life, in his school experience, in 
his course of training, in his social living and service so 
that as all life grows his total life grows as a religious 
life. 



CHAPTER XX 

THE REALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY 

Men stand to-day on tip-toe. It is an hour of tre- 
mendous possibilities. The whole world is awake with ex- 
pectation. All who look forward speak of a new world. 
And there are more looking forward than ever before. 
We know that every day in the past has held the con- 
sciousness of the possibility of change, but we have more; 
we witness vast social changes ; we see peoples in the mak- 
ing. The terrible struggle for the rights of humanity 
against the powers of the flesh and the desires of the devil 
has given us a new sense of the worth of those ends for 
which democracy exists. The high price that all have 
paid and are paying for freedom not only makes freedom 
itself more valuable, it gives it new and more spiritual 
meanings. We cannot but believe that this is the crisis 
of an age-long process in which the world has been finding 
itself, that we shall see the day when men will live for 
those values which are eternal, that when we speak of 
and work for freedom we are thinking of only one part 
of a greater process, one which appears with growing 
clearness, the emergence of the spiritual aims of existence. 

But the far-seeing warn us that our high hopes will 
not be realized without further struggle ; they warn us 
of the danger of reaction. We have been forced to at- 
tempt our spiritual ends with material means. Our em- 
phasis on the power of things may easily give the phys- 
ical and material the ascendancy. Unless we are pre- 
pared to defend and nurture the spiritual fruits of the 
struggle they will be snatched from before our eyes. De- 
mocracy will not be realized until we are ready for it, 

257 



258 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

The problem is not alone one of making the world safe 
for democracy, now it is rather one of making ourselves 
ready for democracy. 

The spiritual conflict knows no end, for the minds and 
wills of men are ever battling between desire and duty, 
between the immediate satisfactions and the far-ofF ideals. 
This is the conflict in which all issues are really settled. 
We have thought much on plans which would insure the 
conditions of human freedom ; are we thinking sufliciently 
on plans which would insure the will to use that wisdom 
wisely.'' We made tardy preparation for our share in 
making the world safe for democracy ; are we now making 
timely preparation of the minds of men to realize democ- 
racy.'' The ultimate issues are in the souls of men. Not 
on battlefields but in our wills the future is being formed. 
The real victories are being won to-day in homes and 
churches and schools. Democracy will be but an empty 
word unless we ourselves are democrats, unless our eyes 
are open to see what it means and our hearts are ready 
to walk in its ways. The immediate duty is that of edu- 
cating a generation who know and love and will the ways 
of democracy. A sense of these needs has been coming 
over the American people. In the fall of 1918 the 
President of the United States sent a letter to the Depart- 
ment of the Interior urging the necessity of maintaining 
at their highest efliciency the schools and colleges ; the 
Commissioner of Education sent a circular to every min- 
ister of religion in the country calling attention to the 
need " to fit ourselves and our children for life and citizen- 
ship in the new era which the war is bringing in." The 
colleges of the country organized themselves for a plan 
by which the immediate needs of the nation might be met 
and at the same time a larger number of young people 
might have higher educational training. Believing that 
a new and larger democracy is possible we must turn our- 
selves to preparation of mind and heart therefor. 



THE REALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY 259 



BASES OF PREPARATION 

Preparation depends on the development of vision 
through education. First, a vision of democracy. Do 
we know what it means? The word is current on all 
tongues. To many it seems to be some concrete blessing 
to be dropped from the skies. To more persons it is 
simply a form of political organization, the one we use — 
and therefore the best. And yet the world knows it 
would not pay the tragic price it has paid for any par- 
ticular form of civil government, and it sees many forms 
of government uniting for this common ideal. It is pos- 
sible to make the vision clear. Children in the schools, 
youth in their varied ways, men and women through the 
churches and the press must have the full spiritual and 
social meanings of democracy explained to them. 
" Where there is no vision the people perish." The vision 
of many comes through the teaching of a few. It depends 
on clear and explicit statements. It is the duty of the 
responsible agencies, the school and the church particu- 
larly, to teach the people. Education for democracy 
must mean, first of all, instruction in the meaning of 
democracy. 

A vision of democracy will depend, however, on that 
which goes deeper than instruction. It arises in our own 
souls slowly through experience. All training in life as 
an experience of devotion to the good of all, and every 
experience of sacrifice for common spiritual purposes 
becomes a revelation of the worth and glory of democracy. 
We believe in that to which we learn to give our lives. 
Just as we purposively instruct in the meaning of democ- 
racy, so we must definitely organize its experiences. The 
spiritual significance and character of democracy appears 
when it becomes a personal experience. Through the 
organization of the life of the family, the school, the 
church and the city so as to effect full social cooperation 



260 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

we can lead young lives into the knowledge of democracy. 
A democratic society teaches democracy. 

Through such teaching and experience we discover 
democracy as a social order and a spirit of life. 

Second, a vision of the meaning of education. This 
will follow from an understanding of democracy. We 
shall see the school as the child's experience in democracy 
on one side and as the people's work in democracy on the 
other. But, also, in answer to the tremendous spiritual 
demands of democracy, we shall see that education is 
principally a process of the development of the spiritual 
life. A people prepared for democracy will be a people 
who have rejected life's lower aims and have found spir- 
itual unity in common seeking for its higher values. 

Education will become the experience through which 
men learn what are the ends worth while in life and how to 
attain them. It will disclose life's values and train in 
life's social methods. The machinery of instruction will 
take its proper and subsidiary place ; children will go to 
school that they may learn to live. Life will make 
learning its servant in the curriculum. Schooling will 
mean the socializing of persons. Education will become 
the right of all and the concern of all because it will be 
the method by which society instructs its growing mem- 
bers in the meaning of life, trains them in the habits of 
the common life, and develops the motives and vision which 
sustain through that life. 

Then education for democracy will become, not a special 
course or a single subject, but the interpretation of all 
life in educational terms and the direction of life's educa- 
tional processes in the light of man's spiritual needs and 
his social aspirations. All the organization of life will 
be controlled by an educational consciousness, a recogni- 
tion of what is taking place in the changing characters 
of persons at all times. Home, school, church and com- 
munity will be recognized as educational factors ; they 



THE REALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY 261 

will be organized to educate. The new education will be 
the direction of the orderly development of the whole of 
lives in their social setting and for their social functions. 

Third, a new vision of religion. If democracy is a 
society of the spirit it depends, most of all, for its perma- 
nence and growth, on the development of the life of the 
spirit. As the spiritual conception of democracy devel- 
ops the life and service of democracy will become the prac- 
tical and social expression of religion, and its sentiments 
and hopes will become the aspiration and shining goal 
of spiritual faith. Either our old religious ideals and 
our old religious forms will carry their force over into 
this new life or men will find new forms. A spiritual 
passion is sweeping over men to-day. It is the passion 
for a social order in which the soul has freedom and 
dominion. Somehow religion — that which lies in our 
concepts as churches and creeds — appears unrelated to 
the vision of the age. Religion must become spiritual. 
It must again reveal man as a spiritual being. It must 
again associate men for the rights of the spirit. It 
must again call man to himself, to this life of a spiritual 
universe of which he is part, and aid him in bringing into 
subjection to its purposes and its fullness all other powers 
and activities. 

Democracy really waits for the realization of Christi- 
anity. When the churches teach and practice Christianity 
they will reveal a social order existing for spiritual pur- 
poses ; they will demonstrate the life of social groups 
wholly devoted to the coming of the kingdom of God, the 
reign of love, goodness and truth. They will believe in 
the possibility of their prayers being answered, that men 
may in a common life of love do the will of God together. 
But spiritual ends seem to be very vague to almost all 
persons, and it is the function of religion to make them 
clear. This is possible, not by explanation, but by 
experience. Our new vision will reveal religion, not as 



26^ EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

something that we teach and discuss, but as a way of 
life which discloses life's quality and meaning. It is a 
social way of life, a way of living together the experience 
of which leads men to realize the true worths and purposes 
of living.^ Religion, like education, has hidden its pur- 
pose under its mechanisms. Its means have become too 
largely its ends. It is not in churches nor in creeds ; it 
is in life. It is life as lived for spiritual ends. It is 
that range of values in life which makes us men and women 
and, most important of all, makes us social beings. It 
is the common life we can and must share together. It 
must appear as the basis of democracy, its underlying 
philosophy, its sustaining motive and its ever enlarging 
ideal. 

Then we shall have religion everywhere. It will not be 
a matter of places or days. It will so saturate all life 
that apart from it no part of true living in a democracy 
will be possible. It will be so common it cannot be 
sectarian. It will be in all our toiling together, all our 
social organizing, all our pleasures, all our schooling, all 
our common experiences, the life of democracy. 

Preparation demands organization. Society is not 
yet organized for social ends. Democracy can never be 
realized under social mechanisms designed for individual- 
ism. But the reorganization necessary cannot be imposed 
on our life as a ready-made scheme. It will be effected as 
in every form we seek to direct our plans to the purposes 
of democracy, as each group is organized for the experi- 
ence of social living and for the purpose of training for 
the life of a spiritual society. The changes may come 
slowly but come they must until men who toil know that 
they are not working by the sufferance of an over-lord 

1 For an adequate treatment of this too-briefly stated position see 
"The Psychology of Religion" (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1917) and 
"A Social Theory of Religious Education" (Scribners, 1918), both 
by Prof. George A. Coe. 



THE REALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY 263 

for wages to keep body and soul together, but they are 
working as their part in complete social living; they are 
sharing life. Changes will come until the home is not 
simply a stall and manger to gain strength for toil ; it is 
the place of the group-life devoted to the growth of lives 
through sharing a common social life of joy and service. 
Changes will come until the church is the common social 
organization of the spiritual life of its community, until 
the school is the socialization of the child and youth life 
of the community so that it may be directed to discover 
the wealth of joy and life and the ways of common living. 
The changes will come until all living becomes a spiritual, 
educational experience of common living, of social devo- 
tion, of religion. 

But the changes will come as the results of social 
intent on our part. Our dreams must lead to deeds. 
Children must be taught by courses in church-schools and 
community schools ; parents must be trained ; teachers 
must be prepared. On the other side there must be 
organization to secure conditions which make possible the 
common social life and cooperation of democracy. Prep- 
aration includes legislation, direction and organization to 
make the world a place in which democracy can be prac- 
tised. 

Tlie realization of democracy waits for leadership. 
We have been discussing ideals that seem to be very 
far off. They are the ideals of leadership. Many may 
criticize them as impractical; others may object that they 
do not sufficiently deal with methods and details. But 
details always follow vision ; methods are discovered when 
men seek to achieve. All who see the ideals must declare 
them even though the means be not yet in sight. The 
leadership of ideals, of vision, precedes all else. If there 
are prophets of democracy to-day woe be to them if they 
are silent ! Woe be to the preachers who wait for the 
people to indicate a pleasing theme when their hearts are 



264 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

burning with a message on life! Woe be to the teachers 
who lead youth in a treadmill when their own eyes see 
a vision afar off, while the youth are hungry of heart for 
that which the teacher sees and does not tell ! We dare 
not be " afraid of that which is high." 

But all leadership is the result of training. Democ- 
racy must train its leaders in democracy. We are train- 
ing leaders ; but are we training them to lead toward our 
spiritual goals.? Are the colleges and universities schools 
of leadership in democracy.? Do we definitely plan that 
the young men and women who graduate shall be able to 
show the way to the better social order.? We train a 
leadership for the church but what consciousness is there 
in that training of the function of religion in the realiza- 
tion of democracy.? ^ Is the ministry trained to lead the 
churches in making their communities spiritual democ- 
racies .? 

And yet democracy is fast coming. No one can fail 
to see its signs, not alone in national and political move- 
ments but in the every-day ways of men. It is coming 
through the new attitude toward the child. It is clearly 
presaged when the national government sets up a depart- 
ment of child-welfare. More and more communities think 
of themselves in terms of the life of the child. We would 
save the children ; we would enrich their lives ; we would 
give them all that our life affords, not because they are 
so interesting, nor alone because they tug at our heart 
strings, but because they so clearly stand for the simple 
values of life, because they are our coming society, because 
they are our supreme opportunity to express democracy 
in giving our lives to the development and enriching of 
their lives. 

Democracy is coming fast through education. The 

1 See " The Seminary and Democracy " by Owen H. Gates, in 
Religious Education, June, 1918, Vol. XIII, No. 3, page 193, also 
published by The Religious Education Asspciation as a pamphlet. 



THE REALIZATION OF DEMOCRACY 265 

emphasis on social principles, social rights and social 
duties is its promise. The old intellectualism is going 
as an ism and becoming the servant of the life of all. 
The college and the university are conscious of the total 
life in which they stand; they are the servants of society. 
Their attitude of devotion to the good of all is the most 
effective means possible to develop in students a like 
personal social attitude. 

Religious education is the promise of democracy. It 
is our social endeavor to train all persons, as spiritual 
beings, for a spiritual world-life. What, then, is educa- 
tion for democracy but religious education, the training 
of persons for living in a social order which is guided by 
religious motives, is conscious of present religious values 
and looks toward religious ideals? That religious ideal 
involves an interpretation of all life in spiritual terms. 
It calls the family back to its function of nurturing 
spiritual beings. It calls the church to train and instruct 
persons in the ways of a democracy of the spirit. It 
calls on our organized social life to realize its undeveloped 
educational powers, to make all life an experience in 
common living, in the splendid joys of common service 
and of self-devotion to all. It calls us all to learn to 
love one another; it invites to the discovery that life is 
our great chance to love and serve. It would lead each 
one to declare, in all humility and all faith, " I am come 
that they might have life and that they might have it more 
abundantly." The life of each is found in the life of all. 



CHAPTER XXI 

DEMOCRACY IN THE CRUCIAL HOUR 

Our faith in democracy served us well in the long 
period of growth, under the strain of settlement, organ- 
ization and development; but what of these days of a 
world distraught, what of days when mankind is in a 
high fever and breaking out all over in eruptive spots 
of political revolution? Where despotism has reigned 
anarchy takes its place and emphatically proclaims its 
political philosophy as the ultimate gospel of social well- 
being; and where democracy has been developing seething 
discontent scoffs at it as an out-worn, unworkable idealism. 
It demands its overthrow and the forcible establishment 
of control by the class that has been so long exploited. 
We sit at home and imagine that the revolutionary con- 
flict will be confined to the areas where protest has long 
been inevitable and to peoples crushed under the heel of 
the oppressor. If we hope this we do so only by closing 
our doors and pulling down the shades while we bask 
by our firesides. And that we cannot do for long; the 
crowd presses at our doors and no police force will long 
avail. For our democracy this is the great hour of 
decision ; is our faith adequate for such times and is it 
strong enough to go forward and fulfill itself.? 

Is Bolshevism the logical fruitage of a genuine and 

thorough loyalty to the democratic principle? Is this 

new way, either in its mild and theoretical form, or in its 

hideous menace as a wild, unrestrained, brutal creature 

of hatreds and lusts, the natural and riper realization of 

democracy .^^ Many believe so, for, they argue, what is 

Bolshevism but the free and complete action of the will 

266 



DEMOCRACY IN THE CRUCIAL HOUR 267 

of the mob, without restraints of custom, precedent or 
law? To them it seems as though the shameful, blood- 
stained and lurid episode of Bolshevik dominance in 
Russia, with its overflow to many other lands, stands out 
as a fearful warning of what will happen to any govern- 
ment that goes beyond praising liberty to practice it by 
giving power to the undisciplined will of the proletariat. 
It is an exhibition, they say, of the extreme form of popu- 
lar government which is no government at all and only the 
anarchistic violence of a mob. But Bolshevism is not 
the fruitage of democracy ; it is the direct result of blind 
autocracy. It is not the logical outcome of popular 
freedom and self-government; it is the inevitable ultimate 
of autocratic control and repression. 

Even the children who have lived through the 3'ears of 
the great war know that Russia sowed the wind and reaped 
the whirlwind. No one could expect that the bitter school 
of cruel repression would furnish the disciplines for a 
restrained democracy. Wherever the methods of old Rus- 
sia have been applied they have brought forth similar 
fruit. It makes no difference whether the serfdom be 
applied in a state or a factory, whether the oppressing 
class be hereditary nobles or industrial barons, their view 
of life and, especially, of the lives of others results ulti- 
mately in developing in men a distrust of all systems of 
government, a hatred of all forms of power and an habit- 
ual impatience with all legal and social methods of secur- 
ing their rights. Under the exploitation of their op- 
pressors they have seen these methods fail too often ; they 
have seen the social processes of life subverted to the ends 
of employers. So steadily and successfully have they been 
deprived of their social rights that, having ceased to 
experience them for themselves, it is not strange they 
cease to regard them or to believe in them for any one. 
Wherever the methods of old Russia have been applied 
they have made possible the Russia of the past few years. 



268 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

That accounts for one kind of Bolshevik, the fruitage, 
not of democracy, not of any sort of a social theory held 
in his mind, but of greedy, selfish, class oppression. There 
is another source from which the ragged ranks are re- 
cruited, the incapables and socially subnormals, the ones 
who because of physical and mental inefficiences and defects 
never would win to a fair share of goods in the current 
social system of competition. Up to this day our world 
has paid little attention to this class. It has been willing 
that the deficients should breed their kind in greater pro- 
fusion than efficients. It has regarded laziness as a mental 
state, a matter of the imagination and feelings, and it has 
felt no responsibility for those who must live on short 
rations simply because they lacked the good sense or 
the grit to stand up in the fight and gain a full share. 
Such persons welcome a social upheaval as promising 
bread without work. They have so long nursed a sense 
of injustice, so long cherished grudges against the suc- 
cessful and so long laid to the social system the inequal- 
ities in possessions of men that they feel everything is to 
be gained and certainly nothing to be lost by sweeping 
changes toward which they have only the irresponsible 
attitude of beneficiaries. 

Surely the remedy for the existence of this class is 
not so very hard to find though it may take a long time 
to effect a change. It lies in the more thorough applica- 
tion of democracy. A truly democratic society will feel 
an inescapable responsibility for the defectives and the 
inefficient. It will not be satisfied until every life has a 
full chance to be all that it might be. It will not leave 
to chance the fitting of these incompetent persons into 
their places in life. It -will not thrust on the refuse heap 
of social failure thousands of its people by trying to 
make mechanics out of farmers and ministers out of mar- 
iners. It will not be satisfied to charge physical handi- 
caps to Providence but, in the light of its primary func- 



DEMOCRACY IN THE CRUCIAL HOUR 269 

tion to develop lives, it will seek to remove these handicaps. 
It will decrease discontent by removing deficiencies. How 
many of our " under dogs " are really lame dogs, blind, 
under-nourished, embittered by early experiences of misery 
and driven into lives of snarling, bickering over refuse and 
bare bones of social neglect ! 

Then we must remember that these are days when the 
methods of the Bolshevik are likely to gain currency. 
Overturning and upsetting has been the order of the day. 
We have been forced into rebuilding a world. We who 
are conscious of our sanity could hardly hope to be 
granted a monopoly on rebuilding nor were our efforts 
so professionally rounded out in proficiency that we might 
hope to discourage amateur rebuilders. Then, think how 
much we have prated about reconstruction, until the word 
is frayed and obsolete ; it is not strange that some who 
always tend to scorn mere words should try their hands 
at a little practical reconstruction and should find many 
ready, willing aids in those who certainly could not find 
things rearranged any worse for them. 

MORE DEMOCRACY OUR HOPE 

The hope for this hour lies in more democracy, in carry- 
ing out our principles to their full and logical conclusions. 
The menace of what we popularly generalize as Bolshevism 
lies in the fact that it is simply a rabid application of 
class control. It does not disguise that fact ; it freely 
asserts that it is the control of all by the class that has 
hitherto been controlled by a few. And the dangers of 
our current methods of combating this new class menace 
are, first, that of subverting the processes of democracy 
by the artificial control and manipulation of public opin- 
ion, and, second, a falling back on the Bolshevik method 
of an appeal to class consciousness. The only differences 
between the methods of Bolshevism and the forms to which 
some of our saviors of society would resort, are that the 



270 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

former does not pretend to be democratic ; it uses no 
screen of the general benevolence to hide its purposes of 
benefiting its followers. Its orators do not prate about 
the public good while they control legislatures for private 
gain, and the Bolshevists use weapons less refined, more 
concrete and evident than our class politicians. The 
latter are skilled in effecting their purposes by innocent- 
appearing laws, by controls of markets, prices and con- 
ditions of living. But when the whole thing is summed 
up, it is not likely that the world has been robbed of 
more life by the rough-and-ready method of the sword 
and flame than by the smooth Marchiavellian " gentle- 
manly " tactics that have stolen strength from the workers 
and made large fortunes by robbing the helpless infants 
of ice and milk. 

Much that many indiscriminately label as Bolshevism, 
Anarchy and Socialism — some to intensify their indigna- 
tion place all three labels on such as they would excom- 
municate — is simply inchoate resentment against our 
modem juggling with democracy. Blind Samson knows 
he has been shorn of powers and rights and fain would 
tear something down. Economic changes have given the 
under dog a new position. He is not an angel either 
because he is under or over. But he is likely to try on 
others some of the tricks long practiced on him. His 
methods are all wrong; explaining them does not justify 
them. But the wrong and failure is not to be charged 
to democracy. Our social chaos is due, in the main, to 
two causes, that we have neither prepared persons for the 
life of democracy nor have we really practiced it, and 
that, under the pressure of a world strain, we called a 
practical recess on democracy as a political method. 

If democracy has failed it has been because it has not 
been tried. It has failed because it has not depended on 
the wills of all; it has not depended on the development 
of a common goodwill in all and it has not applied the 



DEMOCRACY IN THE CRUCIAL HOUR 271 

will of all to the well-being of all. The situation, even 
in the face of so many outbreaks of violence, even when 
the mob seems to have thrown all restraints to the wind 
and to have demonstrated its utter unreliability, calls for 
more faith in humanity, for a more direct and generous 
dependence on the will of the many. The greatest mistake 
we can make at this moment is to lean on autocratic con- 
trol for our protection. 

Our danger is that having tasted the efficiencies of 
autocracy in the manipulation of the forces of the nation 
through the crisis of the war we shall depend on the same 
force to shield and guide us through reconstruction. 
Dependence on the " strong arm of the government," 
as it is now construed, is only a relapse into feudalism. 
Being unable to work out our own salvation we place 
ourselves under the ward of bureaus and autocratic 
groups. Accepting a medieval political serfdom we grate- 
fully depend on the forces organized for control while our 
own powers of social organization and direction degenerate 
into flabby uselessness and final paralysis. 

The corollary of this political serfdom is submission to 
the undemocratic control of public opinion by overhead 
manipulation and propaganda conducted by the con- 
trolling forces. The possibilities of propaganda have 
been demonstrated by the war. A group can gather in 
a committee room and determine what the nation shall 
think. A campaign of advertising, through the ordinary 
channels of publicity and, most pernicious of all, through 
the creation and coloring of news, can start and control 
a tide of feeling that passes for thought and determines 
action throughout the nation. A bureau can, through 
a censor, suppress facts or so distort and maim them, 
lopping off here and enlarging and luridly coloring there, 
that the passions of men are inflamed, hatreds are 
engendered without cause, opinions are created and the 
vast and splendid instrument of the public will is playecj 



272 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

upon to any tune the manipulators wish. What Prussia 
did to control the wills of her people, by the direct and 
detailed control of the press, by the explicit direction of 
the content of the materials of education and the use of 
the pulpits as tools of her purpose, we have been doing 
in every particular. Our motives may have been the op- 
posite of hers, but our method has been the same in almost 
every particular. We count it a crime to use the force 
of clubs and steel but none to use the greater force of 
organized manipulation of public thought. 

We are in danger of preserving the externals and 
killing the essentials of democracy. Maintaining the 
trunk of this fair tree above the ground, in the superficial 
matters of the ballot, we are cutting off its life-roots by 
refusing freedom of thought. There can be freedom, the 
essential of democrac}^, only where thought is free. But, 
with all our vaunted faith in democracy we do not believe 
in freedom of thought. There were good reasons for the 
control of certain classes of information during the period 
of the war; but there is no justification for the control of 
the currents of popular knowledge; there is no justifica- 
tion, except that of autocratic expediency, for the manip- 
ulation of the facts upon which intelligent judgment 
must be based. Who knows, at this hour, what is really 
happening in Russia? Who knows what happened at 
Versailles? We, the people, who are supposed to deter- 
mine our own affairs, cannot be trusted with knowledge ; 
we must be fed like children too young for the real facts, 
with gooseberry-bush genetics and expurgated world 
politics. We who would have no Caesar over our bodies 
must submit to the Kaiserization of our minds. 

If these conditions were but a temporary phase, an 
accommodation to war conditions, we could wait for the 
return to the normal. But they are not a passing 
exigency ; they are the expression of a philosophy of social 
control that is as old as the hills. They are the spirit 



DEMOCRACY IN THE CRUCIAL HOUR 273 

of class-control in action. They express the purposes 
which undermine democracy. They mark the methods of 
the groups which have always been able, despite any party 
lines, to unite for aristocracy — their own class being the 
aristocrats. The motto of " the people be damned " has 
been wiped out of business, but the politician simply 
enlarges it into " The people be damned by being fooled." 

The remedy lies in resistance, the resistance of men who 
are and must continue to be intellectually free. It lies 
in a full acceptance of the faith that an enlightened 
people may be trusted and in an acceptance of the cor- 
relative duty of both demanding fullness of light and 
diffusing whatever light we have. It calls for the work 
of education, giving the light and training and exercising 
the powers of all in living according to the light. The 
attempt to control and manipulate society is an abandon- 
ment of the educational method in the development of 
democracy ; that method must be fully restored. We 
cannot lie quiet, tamely submitting to the arbitrary con- 
trol of our very souls. 

But, specifically, what can be done.? We can demand 
freedom. We can reject from public trust all who do 
not trust the people. We can reject the subsidized press 
and support every organ of freedom of information and 
discussion. We can and must show up the facts ; let the 
scientific investigators of social phenomena throw a clear, 
cold, undimmed light on the present processes of propa- 
ganda. We can erect and conduct other agencies than 
these that have proven false to the democratic trust, not 
only new newspapers and journals but such effective 
means as public forums, discussion clubs and fearless 
pulpits and platforms must be encouraged. Any agency 
that is loyal to facts must be developed as a sustainer of 
democracy. We especially should protect the sources 
of the informing and training of the young; the public 
schools are still — at least until some current plans of 



274 EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 

bureaucratic control get into operation ^ — subject to 
local control ; they must be protected. The churches, 
while they have largely yielded to the machinery of 
propaganda, have done so with good intent ; their free- 
dom can be maintained and their power for enlightenment 
and the development of the spirit of freedom can be 
strengthened. If they refuse to save their own spiritual 
freedom they must be allowed to die. 

And yet more, how much every man needs to fight 
against the tendency that grows with advancing years 
to give up the struggle of spiritual freedom and to accept 
the easy ways of external protection and control. The 
peace that Newman sought in the Church of Rome tempts 
us all. There is no rest for the spirit that seeks growth. 
And there is the tendency to seek stability in the status 
quo. Our material interests in things as they are make 
us fear the ferment of a changing world. Having a little 
holding it is so much safer, apparently, to be serfs, to 
accept the protection of our over-lords than to go on 
venturing all in the long struggle of freedom. The pass- 
ing years accentuate our dread of change ; thought habits 
have cut deep ruts and it is so much easier to travel in 
them than to try the new ways. The spirit of youth 
passes and we no longer feel the stronger attraction of 
pioneering. Against all these things we must fight, or 
cease to grow and live, or cease to be democrats. And 
such a fight we ought not to, indeed we cannot wage 
alone. By social means we must develop self-culture for 
democracy, strengthening the hearts of one another, 
enlarging the common vision and clarifying the common 
knowledge. 

Further, all who believe in democracy must be wholly 
loyal to their faith in these days. Many are the 
attractive short-cuts that open up to the desired ends 
of social well-being. The democrat is always tempted to 
depend on external controls to effect the social good he 



DEMOCRACY IN THE CRUCIAL HOUR ^75 

desires. Legislation, social regulation and regimentation 
promise to do by compulsion that which education, work- 
ing through the will of all, can effect only in a much 
longer period of time. But whenever we take advantage 
of these short-cuts, every time we place our reliance on 
external compulsions we defeat the ends and short-circuit 
the processes of democracy. 

Nor is freedom all we need ; one other dominating prin- 
ciple of democracy must be put into practice and given 
larger power ; we need the controls that, rising and ruling 
in each man's breast, guide all into ways that are above 
our present conflicting aims and competing struggles. 
Society will be saved only as it is ruled by social ideals 
that set first for every one the aim of social good. 
Democracy is more than freedom of action; it is that 
freedom which ultimately liberates every man from the 
bondage of his lower purposes and gives him freedom of 
action in that range of interests where the enriching of 
one never means the impoverishing of another. In a 
word, democracy to-day needs a dominating spiritual 
purpose. It needs a religious ideal, one that will be freely 
discovered and adopted through religious education. 

Are we really democrats? This is, do we believe, first 
of all and most of all, in the personal-social values in 
life? Are these the ends for which we live? Do we 
organize our lives for these ends, test all our institutions 
and laws by their eff'ect on these purposes and constantly 
insist on social conditions which make possible the devel- 
opment of spiritual value? Do we interpret democracy 
religiously, as a spirit of life, as an ideal to be realized 
only through faith, sacrifice and self-giving, as a passion 
and hope, as a way through which the world will find its 
soul ? 

THE END 

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



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